Nebula - the bestest audio plugin since sliced, erm, buffer?

[mcbpete]

 

Nebula. Right, I don't get it ( details here if you've never heard of it )

 

I've demo'd it for a while and come away from it thinking that it's just a disk munching, CPU munching beast that really doesn't really do very much at all, but trawling though various forums like KVR and Gearslutz they claim it to be the best thing that's ever come out in the plugin world.

 

Apparently the demo version doesn't do it justice and you've got to try the very latest commercial version to really get the most out of it, which quite frankly sounds ridiculous - Why have a demo that doesn't actually demo what quality benefits you're actually getting from the thing?! Convolution reverbs I get, convolution compressors, EQs, filters ... not so much !

 

So has anyone taken the plunge in buying it - And if so is it really the most amazing thing ever? There seems to be so very little audio examples out there so always come back with the feeling this is the VST equivalent of snake oil, and that any decent algorithmic equivalent can do far better with better flexibility, for less money (and disk space).

 

But I'm willing to have my mind (ears?) blown away if anyone can point me in the right direction. Convolution go !

[th555]

Wait so is it a VST or can you actually buy that ferrari rack thing?

[lala]

You can buy the render to put on your desktop i think?

[lala]

In all honesty ive heard of nebula so many times but never actually tried them out.. they certainly look juicy & people say they are but...

[Ragnar]

supposedly the volterra kernels are a real thing (but I dunno if it's more than transitioning between several convolutions based on volume, which is my gripe with convolution in the first place, that it's just a 'dead' snapshot of sound from something, or like trying to make something look like film based on a single snapshot of a frame of film?)

 

the PRE -> effects in the demo definitely do something but it still sounded rubbery 2 me

[mcbpete]

Wait so is it a VST or can you actually buy that ferrari rack thing?

That's the thing, they seem to fill most of the site with 3d rendered recreations of the plugins, and not a single space devoted to audio examples. It all just seems a little odd !

[Ragnar]

and like I said I'm not sure if dynamic convolution/volterra kernels are anything more than a crossfade between several convolutions/snapshots/impulses

[xox]

imo it's nothing special cause there's only two things in DSP/audio world that can be influenced: frequency domain and time domain. change audio like you want, do what ever you want to it and you're still within those two domains. so volterra kernels or not, all of those eq and compressors are changing the same thing and imo 'plain' algorithmic plugs if they're made well are doing far better job...and kill me again, imo even better then analogue ones, but by better i mean more precise.

but hey, i'm an md, not a programmer nor a professional audio engineer so i could be totally wrong about everything.

[Nil]

I own a Neb3 licence... and I've almost never used it. The workflow is quite awful, even if it does actually sound good.

For various reasons, I prefer the "algorithmic" approach, and using more original designs (like the plugins from Tokyo Dawn Labs, U-He, Klanghelm and Goodhertz). It's more and more absurd to me not to fully embrace what digital has to offer when using a computer. Vintage gear is definitely a fabulous source of inspiration for devs, but lets take it all further.

[lala]

 

sexy af tho right

[th555]

That reflection hurts to look at.

[mcbpete]

Their new one can reflect trees, just imagine -

 

[Ragnar]

they prob just update cores whenever they feel like saying they did like firefox

I am experimenting with a plugin like this except the convolution is digital and always changing, not really sure if it actually like works tho

[lala]

does it sound good tho?

[Ragnar]

if I start a mastering business I am going to claim it's the only mastering house not controlled by the illuminati

[Test Fforet]

http://soundcloud.com/user18081971/ideas7

"If you want to work with me on any of the ideas PM me with IDEAS in the subject, no person or company too big or small."

 

 

maybe acustica audio teamed up with richard to invent Vectorial Volterra Kernels,

[TubularCorporation]

That reflection hurts to look at.

 

You'd think that since they're rendering 3d models anyway they could render the reflection, instead of just taking the render of the GUI, mirroring it vertically in Photoshop and then using the "perspective" transform and lowering the opacity of the layer it's on a bit.  Which is clearly what they've done.

http://soundcloud.com/user18081971/ideas7

"If you want to work with me on any of the ideas PM me with IDEAS in the subject, no person or company too big or small."

 

 

maybe acustica audio teamed up with richard to invent Vectorial Volterra Kernels,

 

 

cool, you can probably use a head scanner thing and dream, then somehow that head scanner is connected to all the music on line and is able to whrite notes and and capture basic tonal and midi information taken from the persons brain electric signal surges and areas they ocured at. Also that shit is connected to a vocaloid so any dream dialogue should write itself on a txtx file or even play back, of corse I know, duuh, dream time is fucking fast compared to our slow ass real time HERE NOW time.. so you should be able to slow pitch in a loseless manner and THUS (Tuss) you got a real time fucking brain-dream recording self writing mashine analogue robo- dheky ... I think Im a bit drunk ,but the idea is good. Cheerrs Rich and all :

[TubularCorporation]

Downloaded the free version and it sounds pretty good, subtle but useful.  Definitely not the greatest interface though, with some weird choices like, for example, the display for the internal bypass being reversed, so that it's processing when it says "bypass" and bypassed when it says "process". 

 

Not something I'd buy but I'll probably use the free version occasionally.

[TubularCorporation]

Ok, I played around with it more on my actual music workstation in some mixes I've been working on and it actually does sound really, really good.  Still not going to buy it, but only because I'm saving for that Behringer synth.

[th555]

So what did you do with it, RSP?

[mcbpete]

Aye post some 'really, really good'-ness

[TubularCorporation]

So what did you do with it, RSP?

 

Just slapped it across tracks and full mixes mostly, nothing fancy, just wanted to hear what it did. It's usually very subtle, I'll see if I can find something to share that started with source material I'd actually want to post.

 

 

But yeah, not big, sweeping changes for the most part, but what it does do it does really naturally. 

[TubularCorporation]

Ok, here are a few examples with part of the guitar track for a piece of music I'm doing for work right now.  Recorded to 1/4" tape at 15ips with a Sterling ST69 in cardioid, in my small, crappy sounding, untreated bedroom, then dumped to digital through a fall 2012 BLA signature moded digi002r.

 

I bypassed all of the other plugins in the signal path (mostly EQ to get rid of that bump in the low mids that everything in this room gets), rendered these with the "reverb" (i.e. higher quality) version of the free Nebula3, and then level matched them by ear (except for the filter clips, more about those below).

 

24/96 clips:

 

Raw audio

 

A few different things I think it does well.  Al of these are subtle, but do nice things to the mids especially.

 

"New Man" microphone

Default settings.

 

"Small Room" reverb

Default settings.

 

"747" compressor

Very subtle, almost invisible mastering type settings

Ratio 1.5, attack 92ms, release 0.75s, threshold set for about 1db of gain reduction

 

 

 

So, the filter.  I think it sounds pretty good, but something I didn't catch before I posted earlier was that paramater changes are REALLY stairstepped (makes me think the guess that they're just crossfading dynamically between a bunch of different impulse responses is probably pretty accurate), so it's kind of useless for any sort of modulated filtering.  Could be useful in a mix but the stairstepping pretty much kills it for any kind of modulated filter stuff (unless you want that sound, which has its uses).  Pretty crap, to be honest, but there are plenty of good filters out there.

 

Two clips of the "ANT" 6db lowpass filter with the cutoff being modulated across its entire range (stairstepping is the same if you manually sweep it with the mouse):

Resonance 0

Resonance 25

That was enough for me to give up on it as a filter.

 

So the final verdict for me is definitely worth downloading the free version, but wouldn't want to pay what they're asking for it based on what I've tried so far.  For maybe $50 US I'd seriously consider it, since I think the more subtle coloration stuff is pretty nice.  Not much of a creative tool but would be nice for mixing.

[LimpyLoo]

Nebula is amazing

[mcbpete]

We need examples not hyperbole my dear ...Why is it amazing, why is it better than the algorithmic equivalents ?

 

In RSP's examples, I *could* tell the different 'tween the mic one (seemed 'boxier' sounding in the diffusion of the sound, presumably it's like a really short impulse recording) and the room reverb sounded like ... well a room reverb! Though I couldn't really tell the difference between the raw and the compressed version, like at all when a/b-ing them.