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Noise Gate & Downward Expander App from MCLC.
https://apps.apple.com/app/id1488081633
WHAT DOES THIS PLUGIN DO THAT OTHER NOISE GATES DON'T?
Most of the iOS recording apps already come with a built-in noise gate effect. So why do you buy another noise gate? There are 2 main reasons: clearer sound and more natural gate-closing sound.
1 - DOWNWARD EXPANSION SOUNDS MORE NATURAL THAN OPEN & SHUT GATING
The simplest noise gate plugins simply set the volume to zero when the input level drops below a threshold. The abrupt change in volume from that process sounds unnatural and makes it obvious that you are using a noise gate plugin on the signal. Instead of using a gate that fluctuates between two states (open, closed), this plugin uses downward expansion to gently and smoothly reduce the gain as the input drops below the threshold setting.
An example to illustrate this:
With the downward expansion ratio set at 2:1 and the threshold at -10 dB, when the signal drops below the -10 dB threshold level, the plugin doubles its distance from the threshold. So a signal that comes in 2 dB below the threshold goes out 4 dB below; 10 dB below the threshold comes out 20 dB below, and so on. The big advantage to this method is that when the signal is just slightly below the threshold, say 1/2 dB for example, it won't be reduced all the way down to zero volume, so you don't hear an abrupt change as the signal drops below the threshold. Instead it just seems that the quiet sounds are even quieter, and they decay faster than they normally would. This allows you do eliminate a lot of background noise without the listener knowing that you are using a noise gate.
2 - SMOOTHER FILTERING IN THE ENVELOPE FOLLOWER MEANS LESS DISTORTION
The key challenge that all noise gate designs struggle to overcome is how to make sure the gate doesn't flutter open and closed several times at the end of a sound. This is a serious challenge because the input signal is a wave, meaning that it is constantly moving up and down and it crosses above and below the threshold with every up and down motion. How to keep the gate from opening and closing in time with the oscillation of the sound waves? There are many ways to do it, but the basic idea is to slow the gate down somehow, so it can't open and shut too quickly. Of course, slowing the gate down or delaying its closing is not desirable because we need it to close as quickly as possible when the input signal ends and open immediately when it starts up again. Each noise gate plugin handles this problem in a different way, and therefore each one has its own unique sound. To hear how a noise gate performs in this respect, set its release very fast, pluck a low guitar string (or hit a bass note on the piano) and let ring out, listening as the note decays down to the threshold level and the gate starts to activate. If your noise gate allows a fast enough release time, you'll hear a buzzing noise as the gate rapidly flip-flops open and closed for a few moments before settling in the closed position. The audibility of the buzzing sound as the gate closes determines the quality of the plugin. Any gate can avoid buzzing if its release time is set very long, but only the best of them can close down quickly and smoothly without buzzing.
This noise gate plugin has a unique smoothing filter to ensure that the gate makes as little noise as possible when opening and closing, while still being able to open and close very quickly.
3 - SIDECHAIN HIGH-CUT AND LOW-CUT FILTERS ALLOW YOU TO GATE OUT PART OF THE SIGNAL WHILE KEEPING OTHER PARTS
The side chain input is the signal that the plugin follows to measure the input volume. If you have bass drum bleeding into your hi-hat mic, you can gate out the bass by cutting bass frequencies out of the side chain. The result is that the gate only opens when the hi frequencies from the hi-hat are sounding, not when the bass drum is bleeding through.
Comments
A question.
Can the sidechain function be used
with an external sound source for
instance a hi-hat or kick drum?
It only takes one stereo audio input so the sidechain is only an internal sidechain that works on a copy of the main input. Its not a separate external sidechain input like compressors often have.
I would add an external sidechain input to this in a heartbeat if iOS were to add official support for that feature in audio units. To be honest i’m not sure if its iOS that doesn’t support that or if the DAW apps just dont happen to have routing for it. I work with a team of coders and my team members tell me there is no way to do a proper external sidechain yet. We hacked An unofficial one together for our compressor but I wasn't happy with the latency so we decided to wait for iOS and the host apps to add support. If anyone is reading is and knows more details, especially if you can tell me I'm wrong about that, I would love to hear the news.
@Blue_Mangoo
Thank you, good to know.
Could you add two stereo inputs and then
use one of them for the external sidechain?
Yes. Thats what has to be done. And it would be very simple to do from our side. But i dont know how in the host app you would connect the second pair of stereo inputs. The more complex part of that design is on the host app side.
On our team I only write back end signal processing code, never the code that manages connections to the host apps, so i could be wrong about what im saying. But i did contact steinberg to ask them if this can be done in cubasis and they confirmed for me that it can not... yet.
You know, it could be done with the existing host app setup if we worked with mono audio: could use the left channel for audio input and the right for the sidechain. But that is so messy. I dont think we should try it.
Can an AUV3 act as a host app?
I hear you in regards to using a mono input.
That would be a dream come true for me. But currently, no.
damn @Blue_Mangoo , first promise us something that makes us dance and then give us something that makes us silent...
@Blue_Mangoo
Ahh, so the only way to route multiple audio ins/outs
currently on iOS is via inter app audio pipelines?
There's Audiobus and AUv3 hosts too.
yes, that was my plan.
In reality, there are four people in our company. At any one time we are typically working on three different projects simultaneously, so things don't release in the order that I talk about them on YouTube, because I mainly talk about the project I am personally working on.
There are several apps that can split the audio signal into various copies and send each a different way. There are also host apps that mix several signals together. The piece we are missing that is necessary for external side chain inputs is a way to send two separate and independent input signals to one single audio unit plugin, without mixing the signals.
Actually there is a way to do it: we could have two instances of one plugin that communicate with each other to pass audio data, similar to the way our Visual Mixer plugin does. The problem with this is there is no standard among the various host apps that informs us which of the two instances will get processed first and which comes second. If the side chain comes before the audio, everything works perfectly, but if the main audio track arrives and the side chain input isn't available yet then we are in trouble and we have to wait until the next buffer, which means the side chain will be out of sync with the main audio signal.
To make it even more challenging, GarageBand actually processes several tracks in parallel at the same time, each on a different thread and hopefully with each getting its own processor core. That's brilliant in terms of performance but it means there's not much hope of using that method to build a low-latency side chain input.
FabFilter's Pro-C also mentions side-chain inputting but they had to admit that only the Host
can make that possible. They have this feature on working in their Auria Pro only IAP products because the Host added the support for that approach to sub-bussing audio signals.
There's an AUv3 called "Woodpressor" that hacked together and experimental approach
to route the side-chain audio from one instance on the side-chain source into the 2nd instance doing compression.
The DAW developer's are waiting for Apple to create standards (I think). Maybe Auria Pro will
open their implementation for AUv3 developers to code to.
It's a basic audio plumbing issue that should be supported in the platform's developer specs.
It's just not (yet). No clues that it will be.
FAC Transient uses an envelope follower to route MIDI controls to another AUv3 to control
the volume knob into a compressor getting the usual effect of standard desktop side-chaining.
Transient detection and Envelope Following as a design strategy is a largely underserved category of FX. It opens the door to drum triggers and many other creative products.
@Blue_Mangoo Why is it iOS13 only? Will your future apps be limited to this iOS version too?
How close can it get to OTT (ignoring MB capability)
Hence the reason for sidechain apps with
synth kick drums for creating the sidechain effect?
They implemented sidechaining on desktop D.A.W's
with the method you've described using two audio streams.
It's a very logical way of doing it.
When the original Steinberg team came up with side chaining
for Cubase it opened up the D.A.W's for some awesome sonic textures.
Buffering would be a major problem for sure...
Are the iOS audio pipelines built on GarageBand?
We don’t support old versions of iOS because if we did that, we would have to buy additional iOS devices for development for each OS we want to support. I hope that in the future the company can grow a little more and we will be able to offer support for a wider range of OS versions.
Yes. Exactly.
Pipelines for sidechaining? I have not seen or heard any evidence of that.
Your Saturation App will grow the company by 10x. I predict. (I'm right about 10% of the time). I'm definitely buying this Noise Gate. I love my current noise reduction solution except when I have a lot of apps in parallel then I need to drop it. So, I'm eager for a more efficient solution.
I have been expanding downward significantly myself in recent years...
down and out expansions. Not 10x but significant.
It looks like OTT simultaneously does upward compression below the threshold and downward compression above the threshold. Thats an interesting idea, and it’s almost opposite of what our noise gate app is designed to do. I’ll make a video soon to demonstrate our plugin so people can hear what it does.
Please tell me what you like about OTT. If you can help us understand what is special about its sound, we would be happy to build something similar.
Does that mean that your current iOS12 compatible apps will not be updated anymore?
As you know perhaps iOS13 has its issues, thinking especially about Bluetooth midi devices incompatibilities, but that also means that some of us will miss all your new apps
until (Korg) fix their iOS13 problems.
We usually leave the existing apps supporting the iOS they supported when we released them. As long as we keep track of the changes we make we can usually figure out what the cause is, if a customer reports a bug on an OS that used to work in the past. Occasionally we do get stuck and have to stop supporting old OS with new updates, but that usually doesn't happen.
I am aware that this puts everyone in a difficult situation. I thought Apple would stop issuing updates that break major functionality when iOS became more mature but it seems they aren't doing that. I dont see this issue happening on mac OS to the extent that it happens on mobile Devices. Im not sure why that is. Maybe Mac is so mature that they cant think of any way to significantly improve it. iOS is clearly still catching up to desktop software in terms of features.
😅👍🏼
I wish you'd re-consider and support iOS 12. A lot of people hold off on upgrading to a new OS version and iOS 13 has been rocky for a number of popular peripherals. I'd think (having been a developer myself) that it would be beneficial for your apps to support at least the previous generation OS.
I totally agree. But I need to buy another iPhone and iPad before we can do it.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4262018/xcode-simulator-how-to-run-older-ios-version#8477254
Not perfect but some developers do it this way.
You can never have one device per each previous version.
And while you're at it: Making it run on iOS 9.3 will open it for a lot of older devices that should still be able to handle the CPU load (I hope).
Edit: Here's a list of highest installable iOS versions per model.
https://everyi.com/by-capability/maximum-supported-ios-version-for-ipod-iphone-ipad.html
Thanks. That simulator is certainly helpful. We were using it all afternoon today. It isn’t a replacement for real hardware though. For one thing, it doesn’t have the app store app so it can’t install AUM, Cubasis, GB, etc.
What would solve the problem is if apple would allow downgrading the OS. But it seems to me that would open up a massive security hole for people to access data on stolen phones: if i steal your phone and i want to break in, i just downgrade to an os that doesnt have security patches for a well known exploit. Maybe there is a way to resolve that issue though... im not sure.
@Blue_Mangoo: regarding the compatibility. guess it would be even more attractive for buyers when the plugin would support at least ios 12.
i bought it and was disappointed when i wanted to us it on my iphone 5s which can't go higher than ios 12.4.3 for now. will use it on my ipad anyway but you should at least mention the limitation in the app store description.
but nevertheless i like the noise gate very much
I really need several noise gate/expanders solutions, as I’m not totally satisfied with 4Pockets ones. I don’t want to lose Nanokey Studio BT capabilities, but I love your apps @BlueMangoo, so I really hope like others you will find a way to allow at least ios12 compatibility without breaking the 🏦
I generally dial down the downward compression in OTT, OTT is the backbone of bass creation for a lot of genres, you can download it for free from xfer records to try it on desktop.
If you watch any heavy bass tutorial on you tube (Neuro/DnB/Bro etc etc) you will find the sound created by a chain of a multitude of OTT/Saturation/Filters in various orders.