Better Dynamic Range Compression

Would it be possible to implement more sophisticated dynamic range compression code into the Hijack Kernel? Something that works like a studio compressor with soft knee, user-adjustable attack, threshold, release, and ratio, and that applies different compression levels for different frequencies? This would vastly improve the performance of the Auto Volume Adjust feature.

Stu

I'm sure it could be done. It's all open-source, whoever wants to take a stab at it is sure welcome to.

However, after the most recent updates to Hijack with the ability to tweak the voladj settings, I've found that Richard's code is quite good as-is and haven't yearned for anything more advanced.

My only problem has been trying to translate Richard's settings into the more-familiar-to-me compressor terms of attack, release, threshold, etc. His code actually takes a slightly different approach to it than a real compressor would, hence the differences in terms.

Before Richard's code was around, I actually tried running some music through the compressor in CoolEdit, and found that I couldn't get it to sound quite right. The "real" compressor was good for individual instruments, but didn't work well for fully-mixed songs. Richard's code is very transparent and "just works" on full songs.

Now... Having said that...

Something that's showing up as a common WinAmp plugin is a MULTIBAND COMPRESSOR, designed to do essentially what we want, which is even out the differences in compression between varying albums. If somebody implemented one of THESE on the empeg, then that would be rather cool and I would certainly want to try it out.

Maybe we could write the author of that winamp plugin?

How about the guy that did the crossfade plugin too?

Did you try the limiter in CoolEdit? I thought it gave much better results than the voladj does. Which version allows adjustments of the voladj settings? I'm going to check out that plugin.

Stu

If you search for "normalize" you'll see some stuff about that package, which includes an XMMS plugin that deals with RVA2 tags and does dynamic renage compression (despite the name of the package; let's not go down the normalization isn't range compression rathole again; I know it isn't, you know it isn't, the name of the package is historical). The previous discussion should include a link, but if not, you can find a pointer on freshmeat.

Which version allows adjustments of the voladj settings?

All of the recent Hijack releases in the last few months or so. It's a config.ini setting, or you can send it HTTP commands to change individual parameters. It's all in the Hijack FAQ.

The current set of Voladj defaults in Hijack are actually different than Richard's original ones. They're ones that I came up with after these parameter-adjustment features were added to Hijack and then I created a little HTML form to mess with it. The form would throw settings at Hijack and let me test out the different levels interactively in realtime. There was a whole thread on it.

Thanks again for taking the time to do that Tony. There was much rejoicing.

Ah, no problem. I was doing it for myself, too.

Now, if I could only get the same feature into the Rio Receiver client, I'd be happy.