The plugin lets you switch between two MP3 encoders, since under the MP3 standard, the specifics of what to lose in MP3 lossy compression is left up to the encoder. The encoders are LAME, the gold standard for open-source MP3 encoders, and BladeEnc, an old open-source MP3 encoder that has a really bubbly sound and was fun to work with.
I'd love any feedback, and I'll be around to answer questions!
"The infinitely desirable sound of crappy mp3’s, broken cellphones, streaming videos, and much more."
I think Lossy approaches the same idea from a more artistic angle in contrast to MAIM which comes to a similar end from a more technical direction.
Coming from the 8-bit generation I find it interesting and refreshing that the younger generation seems to leave the harsh sound of the bit crusher behind and brings more sophistication into digital degradation. It's no surprise, of course, because low quality lossy compression is what they grew up with, in contrast to 4-bit 4 kHz bit banged crash, my generation would consider lo-fi.
Another plugin that is similar in spirit in the sense that it goes beyond simple downsampling to make things retro is AudioThing's Speakers. It has convolution samples from many old devices like the Gameboy or several old phones. I think it would be the perfect companion to listen to MP3 degraded sound with a speaker from your past.
[1] https://goodhertz.com/lossy/
[2] https://www.audiothing.net/effects/speakers/
I'm not affiliated with any of the companies mentioned. These are just plugins from my collection that came to my mind. Usually I do not post links to paid products at all, but I also think the VST plugin space is somewhat special in that it seems to allow many small companies to exist (maybe even prosper?), which is rare today, so I made an exception here.
Most other usable plugins in that realm cost real money (Lossy is USD 79 for example) so I like to take the liberty to highlight the donation link:
Did want to point out some other cheap/free bitcrushers out there for people to try (in addition to MAIM)
https://www.deniseaudio.com/plugins/my-crush is currently free with newsletter sub and was super cheap when I first purchased it.
Some other free vst of note https://bedroomproducersblog.com/2012/03/09/bpb-freeware-stu...
I also like https://camelcrusher.com/
No one’s going to be converting their music library to old-fashioned low bitrate MP3s, whereas vinyl is more popular than ever. (Okay, maybe not ever, but it’s actually growing again.)
let's not confuse "the only format available at the time" with popular by choice. each time a new format was created, it was adopted to the point of vinyl nearly becoming obsolete. what is old is new again is part of vinyl's resurrection. it's doubtful most hipsters buying vinyl today even have sound systems other than bookshelf speakers to hear a difference in any format.
My point was that vinyl, as well as being (1) pleasingly retro and (2) physical rather than existing in the cloud somewhere, also has (3) fundamentally desirable traits as an audio format — ‘analogue warmth’, etc. Bad lossy digital compression has (1) but not (2) or (3).
You’re right about vinyl’s current popularity not having much to do with that though: it’s mainly (1) and (2) I think.
That said, assuming a pilot signal was added one could probably put two to three hours of PAL-frequency analog audio (which completely went away with digital sound) onto a CD.
I guess im not the audience as I prefer analogue distortion, but I also like the sound of low bit rate digital artefacts (bit crushing and the sound of old samplers) - however unlike those distortion effects this produces quite tricky resonances that I wouldn’t want to apply to audio sources in a track (because then I’d need to spend time EQing them out to make it sit well in a mix), so I’m not sure of the use case?
Bravo on the name though! (and for making it open-source)
My prediction is that after low quality compression we will see good, but noticeable auto-tune as a retro effect. I don't mean the early, late 90s overdone Cher-like auto-tune, but the one that's used seriously for pitch correction but is still noticeable.
After that, I think, bad vocal synths are a good candidate. To my old ears many are right there in uncanny valley - too human for a synth, but not human enough not to be creepy.
does it keep pausing/stuttering while displaying "buffering"? in my neck of the woods, it was hard to buffer enough data that played long enough to hear how shitty it sounded.
Obviously it cannot undo every single artifact caused by MP3 compression, but I was blown away by how much it can undo the bubbly, metallic artifacts of many older MP3s. If your single source for a sound that you absolutely need is an old, low-quality MP3 file, this thing can do wonders that I thought wouldn't be possible. It's quite expensive but if this is something you have to deal with regularly, it's quite worth the price.
https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php?topic=736.msg6877#msg6877
>> How many times does it happen? You click a link to an mp3 file while using Netscape, and before you know it the mp3 file starts loading itself like a text file in Netscape. Either that, or you shift+click on a mp3 file then put save to disk. You goto play it after it downloads, and in no time you are disappointed that it sounds like plain screwed up shit, like you are under water, or you are listening to the lead singer of Type O Negative gargleing on a glass of kool-aid!!! Well with this new fix program that Blex has found out there on the net, I will guide you though fixing this irritating problem!!!
There was even one album that the name escapes me right now (all the track names were named like, if not directly after, exploits) where every other track was more or less just a string of encoder glitches.
I suspect a lot of his sound from that period came from griefing MP3 encoder settings (I mean pretty much all his music features some form of audio sample/synth griefing.)
As soon as I heard those examples the first thing I thought of was Aphex twin (and actually also specifically windowlicker)
[0] https://youtu.be/FATTzbm78cc?t=152 - the "underwater" effect can be heard in this timestamp but there are definitely others layered in the background throughout the track
This seems to be something that's been getting more popular/desirable, I noticed that there was even a physical pedal released by Chase Bliss recently that reproduces mp3 compression: https://www.chasebliss.com/lossy
Thanks!
I'm curious what your path was to get to the point where you can write an audio plug-in from scratch - I noticed you're using the JUCE framework, and that's about as far as I got and I never really escaped tutorial hell.
When starting out, the first plugin I made was a gain/panning plugin, then a simple saturation plugin. These are good ones to start out with, since the output for a sample only depends on the input of that sample, and not the samples before it. After that, I would recommend making a delay plugin: there are a lot of opportunities for creativity with delay, once you have the basic code down.
The plugin project structure can be a bit confusing at first, especially in the interaction between the GUI code and the audio processing code. The tutorials are helpful for that: once you've copied a tutorial, you can try expanding it, adding more knobs etc.
I wrote a toy synthesizer for the ESP32 where I used STK for the bulk of the synthesis. That was pleasant endeavor but the real pleasure started when I wrote my delay effect. I had so much fun adding features like multiple playback heads with separate feedback and volume.
Another fun thing to implement was the apregiator and something that I call a scaler¹, I learned so much about music theory while doing this.
1- There is probably a name for that effect where you choose a scale and if the effect receives a note outside, it outputs the closest note in the selected scale.
edit: I forgot to add that your plug-in is awesome
Pitch quantization.
https://github.com/sudara/awesome-juce
(Direct link to the raw data here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sudara/awesome-juce/main/s...)
Some truly wonderful things in there to learn from - starting with basic plugins, all the way up to synthesizers and a full DAW. Be sure you mine that resource!
The JUCE forum [3] is also incredible useful and friendly place for "noobs", I'm always happy to see how non-toxic it stays 99.9999% of the time.
That said, you'll need something above "noob" C++ knowledge, as that community isn't really so into helping people with C++ basics, but if you have questions about the framework they're always happy to help. The TAP Discord has a channel that's probably a better place to ask audio plugin related C++ questions.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/TheAudioProgrammer [2] https://discord.gg/fdV4npvnmK [3] https://forum.juce.com
For me I’ve looked at using the new Max VST compiler https://cycling74.com/products/rnbo
Great for prototyping ideas.
There is also native instruments Reaktor which is also awesome for low level dsp prototyping. https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/synt...
These tools are for creating the algorithms before programming them in text.
Reaktor is the most difficult for me to work in, that might just be because I learned the other 2 first. But you get their library of pre-built components which is nice. Want an exceptionally accurate Moog filter in your effect? Just drag and drop the one they've already made.