Melda licenses and bundles (not a deal, but info you may want to know)

[Starship Krupa]

Regarding the 50% upgrade credit if you buy from a reseller, right now MRhythmizer is $22 at Pluginboutique for what lists for $59. Not a huge margin under 50%, but still less than the upgrade credit you'd get to go to MRhythmizerMB.

My biggest issue with Meldaproduction hasn't anything to do with pricing, quality, or performance. It's with what is not delivered with the product in the form of basic documentation.

Yeah, even their most basic compressor has more features than other companies' top of the line products, but figuring out how to use and apply those extra features or even knowing that they exist is needlessly obscure. I say "needlessly" because the developer has the most engaged user base of any plug-in developer, people who would be happy to submit "quick start" addenda for the manuals, but he kinda just blows it off. The insult to this injury is that the factory presets often lack in descriptive names, rather they're called something like "ovulating opossum" or whatever.

I mean, I get my money's worth and more, no doubt, but I have all these FX that have extra features that I might use if I could get a better sense of what they did and how to implement that. I could ask on their forum, which has plenty of people happy to help, but a lot of the time I'm so far lost I don't even know what to ask. AND there is an unfortunate growing tendency amongst hardcore users to say how it could be done easily in MXXX, which is a $1200 multieffect that seems to include versions of all of the individual plug-ins. ?

Caveats. The moral is to know what I'm buying and on what terms, and not to bet too heavily on what might be coming down the road.

Edited February 14, 2021 by Starship Krupa
coffee

[Bruno de Souza Lino]

8 hours ago, bitflipper said:

Agreed. Vojtech follows the beat of his own drum when it comes to user interfaces

And that beat is wrong. But he's not the only one in that regard. He follows the usual adage of "user interface is just a beauty tack on top of functionality".

Don't get me wrong, the plugin I used to get a less boring snare sound did the job very well, but others I tried I couldn't even make a sound difference.

If you want an example of user interface done right, that example is FabFilter. Not only the interface is laid out in a way you can understand what it does, their video demonstrations actually teach you how to use their product, instead of being a sales pitch pretending to be a tutorial.

[Starship Krupa]

While I do agree with Bruno that the UI's on a lot of Melda's stuff lacks in accessibility, that's not my opinion about all of them.

Oddly, it's two of the Free Bundle's plug-ins that beat the snot out of every competing effect in their categories, IMO (I haven't tried the legendary FabFilter, so don't hate): MCompressor and MEqualizer.

MCompressor is everything a digital compressor needs to be, The meter shows the exact compression curve. Plenty of compressors do that, even the Sonitus that comes with Cakewalk. Where MCompressor wins is that the animated indicator that shows what the level is and what the compressor is doing is a vertical line that travels from side-to-side over the graph. This makes it dead simple to set the compressor so that the line is "dancing" right across the knee, or only touching it occasionally, or slamming it, or whatever effect you're trying to get. Park it right in the ear-tickle zone and fine tune if necessary. Yes, other compressors have a dot that does the same thing, but for me at least, that vertical line makes so much more sense, to the point that when I was groping to understand compression, it was MCompressor that finally did it.

Unfortunately, the usual Melda idiosyncratic stubbornness creeps in with the other compressors, and I think MDynamics and its MB version are the only ones where you can enable this type of meter. Maybe Maybe MTurboComp, but not the LE version. Anyway, it's not visible unless you click the "edit" button. Despite multiple users praising this metering system to the heavens, he says it's not worth the trouble to add it to the other compressors that lack it. ?

MEQualizer has the usual drag-dots like in the QuadCurve EQ, but it also lets your adjust Q via dragging. It also has a great realtime analyzer display that you can set to show the exact frequencies of your peaks. It also has a simple band isolation mode that cuts the sound down to just the band you're dragging. Of course, in addition to all of this, you can right click on the dots and get the usual insane amount of parameters to select and tune, bu I'm sticking to the front-facing stuff. It's informative, intuitive, and even attractive.

Frustrating, sure, but they make no bones claiming ease of use and say that this stuff is for advanced users, so none of their stuff should be a casual buy
(except for the Free Bundle and MAutoAlign). Other companies do "intuitive" and "instant results" way better. I think the "Turbo" line was his effort to improve that, and if those compressors had the MCompressor metering, I would recommend them to anyone.

[user 905133]

One of the features I appreciate about Melda Productions UI is the ability to close/turn off each section as needed.  Once I get MB (or non-MB) graphics looking picture pretty, I can just turn off the displays and keep just whatever I need in front of me.  I have an older system, so saving CPU power by turning off unneeded animated graphics is a definite benefit of the UI design--even though it has a learning curve that's too steep for me.   

 

[Bruno de Souza Lino]

6 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

I haven't tried the legendary FabFilter, so don't hate

They offer a 30 day trial of their Total Bundle, which also had a now removed option of extending that for 30 more days if you signed their newsletter.

6 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

MEQualizer has the usual drag-dots like in the QuadCurve EQ, but it also lets your adjust Q via dragging. It also has a great realtime analyzer display that you can set to show the exact frequencies of your peaks. It also has a simple band isolation mode that cuts the sound down to just the band you're dragging. Of course, in addition to all of this, you can right click on the dots and get the usual insane amount of parameters to select and tune, bu I'm sticking to the front-facing stuff. It's informative, intuitive, and even attractive.

Sure thing. I don't wanna compare it to Pro-Q3, but the Fab Filter plugin has everything on a single screen. I did fiddle with MEqualizer for a bit and you do javet a lot of tweakability...except that band menu blocks the EQ view and you have to use that atrocious num pad to enter values manually.

6 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

Frustrating, sure, but they make no bones claiming ease of use and say that this stuff is for advanced users, so none of their stuff should be a casual buy

Eease of use and intuitiveness are not the same thing. Every single time tou have to rely on a manual or guide to use a product represents a failure of UX. I dont care if a plugin is complex as long as documentation for it exists. Even military vehciles have manuals.

One practical example. I was looking for an alternative to doing Leslie effects real time, since the Leslie in Amplitube 4 and T-Racks don't work for me. I loaded up madbee's maDulation and had a fairly good sound in 5 minutes. Then I tried MPhaser. Not only could I not get the same sound out of it, but some of the knobs didn't seem to do anything, no master where they were. The LFO would also have this abrupt click that even their rotary preset couldn't get out. At one point, I needed an audio meter to check for peaks, I decided to load MAudioMeter. Not only could I not get what I wanted, I couldn't even figure how to make it do so. Even MNotepad has those weird quirks. You'd think all you have to do is give all keystrokes to the plugin and start typing but that would be too convenient. You have to double click on the text box to man another text box appear on top of it and then you can type your text. Who wants this?

Edited February 15, 2021 by Bruno de Souza Lino

[Starship Krupa]

20 hours ago, User 905133 said:

I have an older system, so saving CPU power by turning off unneeded animated graphics is a definite benefit of the UI design

That's for sure. Meldaproduction products are also smart enough to (I think) shut off all metering when you simply close the UI. I'm a fan of SoundSpot's graphical displays but avoid using the ones with the fancy animations because they eat so much engine, even with the UI closed.

Meldaproduction are also the first plug-in developer I've seen who (in the latest version) turn off the plug-ins when no audio is flowing.

They're irresistible to software geeks like me because of things like this. The modular design, reuse of code, commitment to bug-free products, tinkerability, "mad genius" developer, and, of course, the sound quality. Even the plainness of the UI's encourages me to understand what they're doing rather than assuming I'm extracting mojo from an imitation antique hardware unit.

15 hours ago, Bruno de Souza Lino said:

that band menu blocks the EQ view and you have to use that atrocious num pad to enter values manually.

The band menu can be dragged away from the main window. I agree that having a separate dialog pop up just to be able to type in exact values can be annoying, but in the case of many of the plug-ins, MEqualizer included, that dialog exposes useful ways to enter the data, like a little piano keyboard at the bottom so you can click on it and cut or boost frequencies that correspond to notes without having to know the frequency. In time-based ones, it lets you click on beat divisions, etc. Typical Meldaproduction, useful complexity.

15 hours ago, Bruno de Souza Lino said:

I tried MPhaser. Not only could I not get the same sound out of it, but some of the knobs didn't seem to do anything, no master where they were. The LFO would also have this abrupt click that even their rotary preset couldn't get out.

I was curious enough to check this out, so I fired up an organ patch in TTS-1 and opened MPhaser. Checked for presets, the usual list of 5 descriptive ones, the rest random 2-words put together which don't exclude the "seven words." "Rotary," nope, not even close, so I started with Default. Starting from Default, it took me about a minute to cook up a respectable slow Leslie that when I tried my modwheel, the rate changed with it. I took me longer to type this than to get that Leslie sound, complete with a nice idiosyncrasy in the waveform thanks to the display and Shape morphing knob. The only clinker is that the "Saturation" knob only seems to make the sound louder, not saturated, so to get a distorted Leslie amp, you'd need another effect. All the other controls worked as I would expect on a Phaser. No abrupt click on the LFO, either.

Our mileage varied, but in this case, I see a mad powerful phaser with all its important controls front-facing and labeled correctly, plus a very useful LFO shape display. Also (if you should want to spend more time playing with your phaser than making music) an "advanced" panel that opens into another, more bizarre world of options, including custom creation of waveform shapes and loading a sample to superimpose on the waveform (for fans of wrecked audio, I just tried this, and it gets crazy, ring-modulated sounds, and it even displays the sample's waveform on the main LFO waveform shape display).

It goes to show how different two people's experiences can be. As for manuals and UX, my philosophy is that a program should allow a new user who is somewhat familiar with the type of software to figure out how to perform its standard functions. Controls and menus should be clearly labeled and located and right click context menus for anything that moves. Past that point, for deeper features, that is what the manual is for. MPhaser has the standard controls front-facing (plus a few more). It also has the Advanced panel, with another crazy dimension to explore. That's where things fall apart for me in the Meldaverse, because of the spotty docs. I'd love to tweak my sounds with the options under that Advanced panel, but I can't get anywhere with the generic boilerplate in the "manual." Whatever, MPhaser is still a powerhouse even if I don't touch "Advanced."

P.S. MNotepad now takes only a single click to activate the redundant typing box.?