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 yesterday at 12:24 PM 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.

[TheSteven]

Trackspacer can be golden when you need to squeeze in another track into an already busy arrangement and can't (or don't want to) spend the time re'eqing and rebalancing everything to make it fit correctly. Tweaking the mid/side balance can make all the difference. 

[Amberwolf]

I really appreciate the details on what it does and how it works for you--that function is almost certainly something I could use, as I'm still slowly learning how to make holes for things to interact without stomping all over each other with just a static EQ, and have barely begun the process of learning how to automate the EQs to do this throughout a "song" to make holes for whatever the prominent part is in the others that are backings for that section of the "song", as I switch around which thing is the "lead". 

[Starship Krupa]

15 minutes ago, Amberwolf said:

I'm still slowly learning how to make holes for things to interact without stomping all over each other with just a static EQ, and have barely begun the process of learning how to automate the EQs to do this throughout a "song" to make holes for whatever the prominent part is

Impressive, I've never gotten as far as using automation to do this, my tools were/are static EQ and sidechained compression. I still do manual EQ carving and sidechaining, but they're no longer my main tools for trying to surgically create space.

I've also used the EQ spectrum matching features of MAutoDynamicEQ (now on deep discount as part of MEssentialsFXBundle) and EQuivocate. Those allow you to take a static snapshot of a track's spectrum, then invert it to set the EQ's bands MAutoDynamicEQ is a dynamic equalizer, but it only has 8 bands (I believe). Neutron 4 has a similar mode built into it, and being iZotope, it requires less user intervention than those two. It works more like Trackspacer. MSpectralDynamics has a sidechain ducking feature, but it lacks the straightforward display.

Trackspacer doesn't take a static snapshot, it continuously follows the sidechain input and ducks accordingly. It has 3 knobs. One each for low cut and high cut, to let you restrict the action of the plug-in to a narrower spectrum, and one for Amount, for how much ducking you're going to apply. The higher you crank the knob, the more space you give the sidechaining track, but the more you can hear the hole that it's making. It usually doesn't take that much to increase audibility. The ideal, really, you don't "hear" it until you switch it off. It also has a spectrum analyzer display front and center to let you see what it's doing.

If you're getting into reducing frequency collisions and carving space, Trackspacer bypasses a lot of struggling and drudgery, IME.

If it's piqued your interest, why not download it and demo it while it's on sale. It runs in a noise burst demo mode until you feed it a valid serial.

 

[Amberwolf]

3 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

Impressive, I've never gotten as far as using automation to do this, my tools were/are static EQ and sidechained compression. I still do manual EQ carving and sidechaining, but they're no longer my main tools for trying to surgically create space.

I'd prefer not to have to do it manually.    While it's technically interesting to learn the process, it's tedious and wastes time I could be doing other things with.  (I have six hundred bajillion ideas and hobbies and things I want and/or need to do, and time enough for *maybe* one half of one of them.  So nothing I do is very good, as I don't really have enough time to spend on any one thing...I spend the most time on music because it's such an integral part of "me". ) 

I don't presently have anything that supports sidechaining (not sure if my ancient SONAR itself even does), at least not that works in that ancient SONAR.  So antyhing I do dynamically has to be done with manually created automation.

 

 

3 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

Trackspacer doesn't take a static snapshot, it continuously follows the sidechain input and ducks accordingly. It has 3 knobs. One each for low cut and high cut, to let you restrict the action of the plug-in to a narrower spectrum, and one for Amount, for how much ducking you're going to apply. The higher you crank the knob, the more space you give the sidechaining track, but the more you can hear the hole that it's making. It usually doesn't take that much to increase audibility. The ideal, really, you don't "hear" it until you switch it off. It also has a spectrum analyzer display front and center to let you see what it's doing.

If you're getting into reducing frequency collisions and carving space, Trackspacer bypasses a lot of struggling and drudgery, IME.

It certainly sounds like it would be ideal for what I want to do (if you've listened to any of my tracks I'm sure you can hear the problems I create for myself with overlapping bands of sound).   

The spectrum analyser itself would be very useful, because with my tinnitus and associated hearing problems, there are things I can't hear as well, and some I simply can't hear at all, that then cause me to mix and EQ wrong.   I"m trying to learn how to compensate for it, but it's tough, since right now I have to depend on other people to tell me what is wrong with something, then try to see what they hear, and learn how that looks so I can then look for it to catch it on my own. Voxengo's SPAN has helped in a few cases to see things, but it does not seem to show an accurate spectrum; the bass end either shows way higher than it is, or way lower, based on feedback I get from the tracks I mix trying to use it to see what I'm doing.  So....

I've been using Audacity's built in colored-spectrograph track view to look at exported tracks from SONAR, but it still doesnt' mean much to me, I'm still learning how to associate the visual of it with the sound I hear; it's very difficult because to me sound is sound and visual is visual and while I can make them synced or see them / hear them as synced I can't really "grok" them together as one thing.   (probably the same problem that keeps me from being able to "read" musical notation--I can transcribe a piece of sheet music into a MIDI file within SONAR, more or less, but it doesn't mean anything to me, sound wise--the markings are not notes, not sound, not audible, even watching the staff view as the tracks play....). 

 

3 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

If it's piqued your interest, why not download it and demo it while it's on sale. It runs in a noise burst demo mode until you feed it a valid serial.

Since their FAQ isn't clear, I sent them a message asking how their plugin authorizes, whether it works on it's own on a completely offline system, has any form of manager or other non-plugin stuff that it needs, autoupdates itself, etc., because none of that is allowed on my system. If it is like any good well-behaved software should be, then I'll try their demo out and see if it does what I expect it to from this thread's info (and that it truly is well-behaved), before I spend some of my limited grocery money on it. 

 The question sent to them will also test out their support system, as the way they answer (or if they do) will tell me about how much help they'll be if I have a problem, and whether I would want to deal with them or not.   (they probably won't hold up to my ideal, as most don't; ATM Cakewalk's support holds the prize, with Grin Tech ebikes.ca second place). 

 

 

Edited 11 hours ago by Amberwolf