Low level muting of VST’s? Was there a change with Reason 10.4?

[DJMaytag]

At some point in the past year or three, I noticed a problem with the Expert Sleepers Silent Suite of plugins (and RE’s & VST plugins in general) such that instruments get muted at -96dBFS and below. For the most part, this wasn’t a problem, as I found a workaround by creating an instrument by putting the equivalent FX plugin into a Combinator, and setting it to receive notes.

I haven’t used the Expert Sleepers stuff in quite a while, but now this doesn’t seem to be working, unless the plugin window is open. What’s worse now, is that the threshold to mute is even higher -96!

10.4 was supposed to bring some VST performance improvements, but was this done at the sacrifice of auto-muting effect plugins? Does anyone happen to have any information on what exactly changed after 10.3 to 10.3?

[selig]

At some point in the past year or three, I noticed a problem with the Expert Sleepers Silent Suite of plugins (and RE’s & VST plugins in general) such that instruments get muted at -96dBFS and below. For the most part, this wasn’t a problem, as I found a workaround by creating an instrument by putting the equivalent FX plugin into a Combinator, and setting it to receive notes.

I haven’t used the Expert Sleepers stuff in quite a while, but now this doesn’t seem to be working, unless the plugin window is open. What’s worse now, is that the threshold to mute is even higher -96!

10.4 was supposed to bring some VST performance improvements, but was this done at the sacrifice of auto-muting effect plugins? Does anyone happen to have any information on what exactly changed after 10.3 to 10.3?

In Reason this is called "silence detection", which (as you have pointed out) does not make sense with a CV device. But my only comment is to say that implementing silence detection is up to the RE developer. I'm not sure what is happening with the VST wrapper in Reason, maybe it is a global thing? FWIW, Selig Gain uses around -144 dBFS as its "silence detection" point.

[DJMaytag]

In Reason this is called "silence detection", which (as you have pointed out) does not make sense with a CV device. But my only comment is to say that implementing silence detection is up to the RE developer. I'm not sure what is happening with the VST wrapper in Reason, maybe it is a global thing? FWIW, Selig Gain uses around -144 dBFS as its "silence detection" point.

I had extensively tested a bunch of things in Reason, and it was instruments in general, both VST & RE, that muted below -84dBFS. Some of the specific plugins in the Expert Sleepers suite have both instrument and FX versions, and I thought I had tested the FX versions as having ZERO muting going on, period. I had found a workaround to turn an FX into a instrument, as noted, but (upon further testing), it appears as if Combinators now also suffer from the muting issue. The workaround still works, but the audio can't be routed thru the Combinator.

[DJMaytag]

If there is any change I could see happening, is that there is now INPUT muting going on for FX VST's, if not both VST's and RE's.

[orthodox]

Not sure about the VST wrapper, but an RE FX device cannot pass the acceptance test if it does not kill its output when the input signal is lower than -154 dB.

[DJMaytag]

Not sure about the VST wrapper, but an RE FX device cannot pass the acceptance test if it does not kill its output when the input signal is lower than -154 dB.

OK, so that’s not likely to be it. I’m suspecting something different is happening with Combinator. Things seem to be working better when NOT routing thru the Combinator audio output.

[DJMaytag]

Bumping this because something in R12 is causing this to happen to devices that worked fine in R10. There is a definite pattern in which this occurs, with what I can only assume is VERY low level dithering happening, based on it occurring at the exact same bits in different devices (Reason's Spider Audio Merger, Photon, and Ω Merger)

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