FabFilter

hey guys,

are you looking into porting fabfilter plugins over to the UAD platform? fabfilter eq, gate, limiter etc. have become my go-to plugins and i would love to save bandwidth for my virtual instruments, running fabfilter plugins on UA dsp hardware.

of course it would be great not having to buy the plugins again, but i think it might also be a good revenue opportunity for you guys to open up fabfilter to the UAD community. i for one didnt know about fabfilter, but was a heavy user on UAD stuff.

thanks a lot,

chris
www.listen2unique.com

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the suggestion! Allthough I don't know the exact specific requirements for the UAD DSP platform, I assume that developing for UAD DSP is similar to developing for AAX DSP.

Some months ago, we did a thorough investigation to see whether it would be possible to port our plug-ins from native to DSP. Unfortunately, the conclusion was that a simple port is impossible.

Our plug-ins use advanced and complex processing techniques that don't translate well to the somewhat limited resources provided by the DSP systems (both CPU and memory-wise). Making DSP versions would only be feasible if we would recode the processing from scratch, and even then we're not sure we could match the features and audio quality in the native plug-ins while also allowing a decent number of instances per chip.

In other words, native systems are massively powerful nowadays and our plug-ins have been designed to take full advantage of these possibilities. This is great, but makes it harder to scale them down to a more limited architecture.

So for now, we will not start working on DSP versions of our plug-ins. Perhaps in the future if these DSP platforms becomes more powerful, using CPUs similar to native systems, we might reconsider...

Cheers,

Totally agree with this:
"In other words, native systems are massively powerful nowadays..."
I see no advantage of reinventing the wheel and port stuff to UAD, when it's not easily possible and there's no sound benefit to it.

Of course they have great plugins there at UA (emulations etc), but I simply don't get it why some see having native plugins on UAD a big plus, because then you're limited by your DSP Power, which isn't cheap at all and have to buy all "native" plugs from ua again, just to use up you're DSP?

Just my 2 cents. Stay native and creative! :)

"Stay native and creative"... that's a great tag line indeed :-)

hey guys,

@floris: thanks for the thorough explanation. makes sense. i always appreciate a clear statement, even if the answer was not the one i was hoping for.

@soniceldorado: just to elaborate why i was asking for this: instance count. i am mostly working with a macbook and lots of resources are already used up by virtual instruments (strings, piano, drum samples..). so i am thankful for anything that doesnt use internal memory / cpu. maybe i should just get the new mac pro with enough compute power, it seems a lot more portable ;)

i also think that the "big" studios are using dsp solutions for similar reasons - altough they probably have around 500 tracks more compared to my projects ;)

cheers
chris