Trackspacer $29 at Plugin Boutique

[Starship Krupa]

https://www.pluginboutique.com/products/3259

One of the best plug-in purchases I've ever made. Def in the top 5, maybe #1. I've long held that given a DAW's stock plug-ins, MFreeFXBundle and Kilohearts Essentials, I'd feel comfortable mixing just about any project, therefore the rest of my collection of FX plug-ins is pure luxury (except for the weird ones like Glitchmachines and Unfiltered Audio). The only one I'd miss would be Trackspacer and I'd miss it bad. It's not even worth questioning whether it'll actually get used. If you're mixing 2 or more audio tracks, it will get used, probably on every project, and your projects will sound better for having used it.

Does what it does so well and with such little effort that it feels like cheating. Surely, something that gets this important task done so easily must have a drawback? Well, I have yet to hear anyone say anything negative about it. I've tried other products that claim to perform the same function and while I got similar results with one of them they all cost more and....I already have Trackspacer.

It goes on sale maybe once or twice a year at this price. I've never seen it for less.

[Amberwolf]

29 minutes ago, Starship Krupa said:

Does what it does so well and with such little effort that it feels like cheating. Surely, something that gets this important task done so easily must have a drawback? Well, I have yet to hear anyone say anything negative about it. I've tried other products that claim to perform the same function and while I got similar results with one of them they all cost more and....I already have Trackspacer.

aaannnd...what is it that it does so well for you? 

[msmcleod]

1 hour ago, Amberwolf said:

aaannnd...what is it that it does so well for you? 

If you've been battling to get two tracks to fit together without fighting each other, this does the trick.

I don't use it much myself (if EQ fails, I'd rather re-visit the arrangement or the sounds I'm using), but it certainly does the job if you're struggling, and can be a massive time-saver.

[Starship Krupa]

4 hours ago, Amberwolf said:

aaannnd...what is it that it does so well for you? 

It does what it is designed to do and claims to do.

From Wavesfactory's product page:

"Trackspacer creates space in a mix by carving the frequencies that a track needs. It applies an inverse EQ curve after analysing the sidechain signal."

In one example, let's say you have a rhythm guitar track and a lead vocal track. The frequency space they take up overlaps and collides, leading to unpleasant build up and/or less intelligibility of the vocals.

Put Trackspacer on the rhythm guitar track, feed a send from the vocal track to its sidechain input, and it will carve out a sonic space in the rhythm guitar track. It does it dynamically, so that during the times when there is no vocal, the rhythm guitar track will be unaffected. It only carves out the space when the space needs to be carved.

The traditional tools for doing this sort of thing are EQ and sidechained compression, sometimes both. The advantage Trackspacer has over them is that unlike EQ carving (which I believe is what Mark is referring to), it's dynamic, and unlike simple sidechained compression, it only ducks the frequencies that need to be ducked, not the entire spectrum.

With static EQ carving, when (in our example) there's no vocal, the rhythm guitar track will still have the EQ cuts, which will then not be masked by the presence of the vocal. This can make the mix sound thinner.

In situations where you can't revisit the arrangement or sounds, perhaps because it's someone else's music or the genre calls for having those two specific instrument sounds, Trackspacer is especially useful.

Edited 10 hours ago by Starship Krupa

[Xoo]

How noticeable is the effect in the rhythm guitar part in the example you gave (I tried a demo of this or a similar product and didn't notice any beneficial effect on the mix, but that might have been me :-))?

[Starship Krupa]

2 minutes ago, Xoo said:

How noticeable is the effect in the rhythm guitar part in the example you gave (I tried a demo of this or a similar product and didn't notice any beneficial effect on the mix, but that might have been me :-))?

It's really just to be used in situations where there are frequency collisions. If your tracks don't have that problem to begin with, it's not going to do much. Maybe the program material you tried it on wasn't especially collision-y in the first place?

It's also wonderfully transparent. One of the principles behind EQ carving is that you don't perceive the track being carved as missing anything because the presence of those frequencies in the other track's program material masks it. Trackspacer goes a step further and applies the cuts dynamically, so it's less noticeable. What you'd be listening for is only a perception that the vocal track is louder (even though it's not, it's just not being masked by another track). I sometimes have to pull the fader back a touch to bring things back into balance.

P.S. Some Italian university students came up with a freeware plug-in called "The Masker" that claims to perform a similar task:

https://audioplugins.lim.di.unimi.it/

I haven't compared them side by side on the same program material. I already have Trackspacer, and $29 (below my "party-size pizza" threshold) is cheap for what it does. One thing I noticed about The Masker's UI is that there are way more controls, which suggested to me that using it may require more dialing in. It also has a freeware "look" to it while Trackspacer's visual design is easier on the eyes. I'm glad The Masker wasn't around when I bought Trackspacer because my cheapskate ***** couldn't have resisted fiddling with it and I might not have gotten around to trying the processor I'm so happy with.

There are plug-ins that are "industry standards" that when I've tried them, I could see instantly why they were industry standards. XLN's RC-20 is another one. RC-20's purpose is to make sonic material that's too clean sound more lo-fi, using the usual methods of adding vinyl crackle, wow, flutter, other noise, bitcrushing, etc. It's really a multieffect, and it doesn't do a single thing that I couldn't do using other plug-ins. But it's so focused on the task it's designed for that it's worth the price of a party-size pizza. Just in the speed with which I was able to get the results I wanted and could then move on to the next thing.