I don't know if you have come across my SACD conversion script, but that automatically removes silent channels before taking DR readings - PM me if you don't know where to look...
SPECWEB (Now 2.2)
- Thread starter MC Maniac
- Start date
Help Support QuadraphonicQuad:
I don't know if you have come across my SACD conversion script, but that automatically removes silent channels before taking DR readings - PM me if you don't know where to look...
Eye of Horus
Member
You guys gonna make Snood make the jump :banana:
Welcome to the QQ forums Surround Maker, hope you will stick around for a bit or more and you should tell EOH to stop by and say Hi :banana:
It would be awesome koo to have the Main Guy hanging around QQ
Wanna thank all you guys like EOH, SurroundMaker, Holland123, Jan, Otto, McManiac, PoRFiN and GART for all the time and hard work you put into these koo awesome mixes for everyone to listen & enjoy. Very Koo Very Mega Koo
Thank you so much we all appreciate :banana:
HI !!!!!!!!
My first post here after 7 years ;-)
SurroundMaker
New member
- Joined
- Jan 26, 2016
- Messages
- 9
Because some people asked : my nickname on the secret forum was Dreamscape and on SN it's flipsen2 .....
Te gek, great to see you here EoH!!!!
OMG OMG OMG it EOH - Heya EOH wow glad ya stopped by and said Hi. :banana:
As you can see, you have a lot of fans here that truly appreciate everything you have done for 5.1 and for us. Letting us all enjoy this amazing hobby even more.
Thaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaank You EOH :snoodhug:
Dammit when is Snood getting his own emoticon
You fooled me there!
Keysersose says hello and nice to have you back!
Eye of Horus
Member
Thank you all for the nice words. It made this 60 years old one blush !
It very nice too to meet old friends again after all those years.
Surroundmaker informed you about my healthproblems and I can add that every day is a valuable one because it means I'm still alive and able to do the things I like. Despite all those issues I'm still very busy with upmixes almost daily. The development of new methods stopped since I finished WAMINU , although I just finished a WAMINU version that handles the mch-flac from Specweb as input. A defitinitely improvement on the default output !
My own conversions are still made on the song-should-fit-the-method-and-the-method-should-fït-the-song rule ! RMS -15 Db or lower : 90 %WAMINU, 5 % DTS Neural, 5% others? RMS -15 Db or hgher 30% WAMINU, 20 % DTS Neural, 25 % QSXTPRO and 25 % SPEC. WAMIINU performs bad on too loud mastered sources.
I also want to say how much I miss my old partner Andreas. It seems he vanished from earth...... without him I would have been no more than a guy with a lot of ideas on upmixing. He was able to translate them into code and in our working together we tried out hundreds of ideas..... the ideas are still there, only miss the technical guy next to me.
Enuf rambling ;-)
It feels good to be "back" !
Grtz,
EoH
It very nice too to meet old friends again after all those years.
Surroundmaker informed you about my healthproblems and I can add that every day is a valuable one because it means I'm still alive and able to do the things I like. Despite all those issues I'm still very busy with upmixes almost daily. The development of new methods stopped since I finished WAMINU , although I just finished a WAMINU version that handles the mch-flac from Specweb as input. A defitinitely improvement on the default output !
My own conversions are still made on the song-should-fit-the-method-and-the-method-should-fït-the-song rule ! RMS -15 Db or lower : 90 %WAMINU, 5 % DTS Neural, 5% others? RMS -15 Db or hgher 30% WAMINU, 20 % DTS Neural, 25 % QSXTPRO and 25 % SPEC. WAMIINU performs bad on too loud mastered sources.
I also want to say how much I miss my old partner Andreas. It seems he vanished from earth...... without him I would have been no more than a guy with a lot of ideas on upmixing. He was able to translate them into code and in our working together we tried out hundreds of ideas..... the ideas are still there, only miss the technical guy next to me.
Enuf rambling ;-)
It feels good to be "back" !
Grtz,
EoH
Working on an upmix of BTO Greatest Hits....my guess is it will sound great. The CD I have has outstanding sound, with DR off the charts for the most part.
EOH - Hey we are awesomely happy you are back. :banana:
Very happy that you that you are feeling better and can do the things you like.
We all just want to thank you for eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeverything you have done to expand, produce, help with and keep surround sound going and alive.
A lot of people here are going to be able to carry on the surround sound legacy with everything you have done and will do. I am glad that finally credit is being given where credit is due :banana:
Shine a light!! :worthy
Thank you EOH :snoodhug:
You guys gonna make Snood make the jump :banana:
Welcome to the QQ forums Surround Maker, hope you will stick around for a bit or more and you should tell EOH to stop by and say Hi :banana:
It would be awesome koo to have the Main Guy hanging around QQ
Wanna thank all you guys like EOH, SurroundMaker, Holland123, Jan, Otto, McManiac, PoRFiN and GART for all the time and hard work you put into these koo awesome mixes for everyone to listen & enjoy. Very Koo Very Mega Koo
Thank you so much we all appreciate :banana:
If that's me you meant there, that's too much credit to be in one line with the others. I was only involved in a project that EoH started but didn't do any of the upmixes.
JerseyEd
400 Club - QQ All-Star
Spent yesterday converting a whole bunch of stuff to listen to this week. Started out with some Beatle-esque stuff - "No Dice" & "Straight Up" (Badfinger), "Capital Collection Series" (Raspberries), "The Rutles" & "Archaeology" (Rutles). Then moved on to "Anthology 1968-1985" (Todd Rundgren), "Fanny Hill" & "Mother's Pride" (Fanny - most underrated girl group ever, imo), "A New World Record" & "Time" (ELO). :music
- Joined
- Apr 11, 2010
- Messages
- 930
No,
SpecWeb works by processing audio in the Spectral Domain, vs. the Time Domain. The default method, ArcTan, is the mathematical inverse of constant power panning, so we get back the "pan" position of each frequency in the mix, at a given time.
We can then use the pan information to assign that frequencies' magnitude to a position in surround space, vs. stereo space. The result is the original stereo mix spread out into surround space.
SpecWeb works by processing audio in the Spectral Domain, vs. the Time Domain. The default method, ArcTan, is the mathematical inverse of constant power panning, so we get back the "pan" position of each frequency in the mix, at a given time.
We can then use the pan information to assign that frequencies' magnitude to a position in surround space, vs. stereo space. The result is the original stereo mix spread out into surround space.
I've done some more work on getting good Quad upmixes and think I have cracked the workflow - but it is a bit more involved than my first few 5.1 upmixes. I have used the following workflow on two albums so far (2nd Law and Drones by Muse) and the results are excellent IMHO!! Essentially I am doing a two pass conversion - then taking the front channels from the first output and merging with the rears from the second.
1) Up-sample the source files to 176.4/192 using sox and merge together any tracks that segue into one another first
2) Start SpecWeb Play with the following command line switches - "SpecWeb.exe -P1 -M1 -c0 -f0 -a0 -l0 -r0 -o0 -40 -50 -C0 -z1 -L-0.1". This essentially presets most settings to zero, turns of ZAG, and sets to Artcan mode.
3) Set gain for Centre and LFE to -110 and tick the 'Norm only' box
4) Isolate the front channels and gradually raise the Front width until it is not distorted.
5) Switch to isolate the rear channels and check that you have some good isolation in the rears and can not not hear too much vocals or other 'centre oriented' content - This generally seems to be somewhere between 70 and 100.
6) Increase the centre width to somewhere between 20 and 30 to take out the remainder of the vocals.
7) Set Adjacent speaker to 0.04
8) Save an ini file in a subfolder called sLsR named as per the source file.
9) Set the centre width back to zero and save another ini file in a sub folder called LR
10) Repeat steps 2-9 for each source file
11) Put a copy of all source files in both the 'LR' and 'sLsR' subfolders and run the conversion process through the QQ Helper
12) Once complete, extract the Front channels from the LR output and the Rear channels from the sLsR output and put the two sets of newly created 2 channel files in separate folders. I have written a couple of batch files to do this in SoX.
13) Run both sets of files created in step 12 through DRMeter in Foobar to get peak and RMS levels. Also get DRMeter levels for the stereo source files.
14) The next process will adjust the levels of the output files to match the relative RMS levels of the source file, with the rear channels set to 3dB lower RMS than the fronts
15) I have written a spreadsheet into which you can input the peak and RMS levels calculated in step 13 and create a custom batch file to adjust the levels of the LR and sLsR sets and merge to form your final 4.0 Flac files. It is reasonably self explanatory - If the figure in cell I:50 goes red, manually put the same number in the adjacent cell and it should change to 0.00
16) Copy paste the content of cells A:55 to A:112 to notepad and save the file as gain.bat in a folder that has the output from step 12 in two subfolders named LR and sLsR
17) Double click gain.bat and you should get your final files a few minutes later, ready for final tagging etc
On the two conversions I have done using this process, I have found there to be much less distortion and artifacts in the rear channels - and of course, without a centre channel there can be no distortion/artifacts there either.
The attached zip file contains the batch files used to extract out the LR and sLsR files, the spreadsheet and an example gain.bat
Bender
300 Club - QQ All-Star
How did A New World Record come out?
JerseyEd
400 Club - QQ All-Star
Hi Bender,
This came out really well. Be aware that I just use the default settings. Depending on the song, some have a lot more in the rears than others. "Tightrope", "Telephone Line", "So Fine", "Do Ya" and "Shangri-La" have lots of strings in the rears. There's a siren in the beginning of "Mission (A New World)" that pans from LS through the fronts and ends in the RS. The solo violin on "Livin' Thing" is in the RS, as is the solo synth in "Above The Clouds". "Rockaria" has some guitar fills in LS.
All in all it sounds great, imho. At times, various keyboards, guitars and vocals show up in the rears, along with some drums. I highly recommend converting this.
SpecWeb 1.2 bug I just noticed: When processing a 176kHz file, SpecWeb.ini is supposed to automatically choose an fft of 32768; however, I noticed while watching the SpecWeb processing window that these files are being processed at an fft of 8192, which will result in a lower quality multichannel output file. Not sure how to correct this...
So I'm late to the party.
Well, today I FINALLY had time to do some music stuff on the big PC and decided to try SPECWEB. So I've been into SPEC since it started, mostly part time. I bought the Plouge Bidule way back when so I could futz around with it. Folks, I am no SPEC Wizard, that's for sure. I usually forget how to use it when I don't use it for a while and it take me a while to ramp back up.
So I loaded SPECWEB 1.2 and once I figured out that all I had to do was drop a file on the icon, I gave it a shot. I used a file from the Beatles USB deal that I had on the PC as a .flac file, and one I had already run through the Surround Master Involve (QS) mode to get a 4CH wav file. I was not thrilled with that outcome, so I just let it sit there. However, today it came in handy for comparison.
Anyway, I took this .flac file ("Across the Universe", the Wildlife version from Past Masters) and dropped it on the icon, left everything at default and proceeded to let it do it's thing. HOLY CRAP!!!! The results were AMAZING!!!
The Involve mode produced a 4 Channel result that was not that impressive, so I immediately thought the source did not lend itself to upmixing. But the results from the default SPECWEB 1.2 are quite astonishing.
Below are the two wav files. You should be able to see the difference. The rears on the SPECWEB have the "girls" clearly in the rear left singing the chorus virtually BY THEMSELVES, while the responding "Ah-Ah-Ah-Ah-Ah-Ah-Ah-Ah" are clearly in the right rears following where they should be. You can also see at the beginning of the tune the birds are flying all around the 5 channels. (NOTE: The 4ch file is the SM output, the 5.1 file is the SPECWEB 1.2)
I may post a wav file of the rears only for y'all to hear. VERY COOL. AMAZING JOB by Zeerround. I need to try the QQ Helper app next.
SUPERB!!!
Well, today I FINALLY had time to do some music stuff on the big PC and decided to try SPECWEB. So I've been into SPEC since it started, mostly part time. I bought the Plouge Bidule way back when so I could futz around with it. Folks, I am no SPEC Wizard, that's for sure. I usually forget how to use it when I don't use it for a while and it take me a while to ramp back up.
So I loaded SPECWEB 1.2 and once I figured out that all I had to do was drop a file on the icon, I gave it a shot. I used a file from the Beatles USB deal that I had on the PC as a .flac file, and one I had already run through the Surround Master Involve (QS) mode to get a 4CH wav file. I was not thrilled with that outcome, so I just let it sit there. However, today it came in handy for comparison.
Anyway, I took this .flac file ("Across the Universe", the Wildlife version from Past Masters) and dropped it on the icon, left everything at default and proceeded to let it do it's thing. HOLY CRAP!!!! The results were AMAZING!!!
The Involve mode produced a 4 Channel result that was not that impressive, so I immediately thought the source did not lend itself to upmixing. But the results from the default SPECWEB 1.2 are quite astonishing.
Below are the two wav files. You should be able to see the difference. The rears on the SPECWEB have the "girls" clearly in the rear left singing the chorus virtually BY THEMSELVES, while the responding "Ah-Ah-Ah-Ah-Ah-Ah-Ah-Ah" are clearly in the right rears following where they should be. You can also see at the beginning of the tune the birds are flying all around the 5 channels. (NOTE: The 4ch file is the SM output, the 5.1 file is the SPECWEB 1.2)
I may post a wav file of the rears only for y'all to hear. VERY COOL. AMAZING JOB by Zeerround. I need to try the QQ Helper app next.
SUPERB!!!
Here's one minute of the rears of Across the Universe (Wildlife Version) created by SPECWEB 1.2 using default settings
View attachment ATUSample.mp3
View attachment ATUSample.mp3
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