Happy New Year! Blue Cat's MB-5 Dynamix V2 is Here!

[Blue Cat Audio]

Happy new year, kitties!

We are very excited to finally unveil today Blue Cat's MB-5 Dynamix 2.0, a new version of our multiband dynamics processing plug-in announced at NAMM last year.

The user interface has been completely redesigned, and the plug-in now offers better control over the dynamics response, external side chain support and many other new features and enhancements (full list below).



Pricing:
- Upgrade: free for customers who purchased the plug-in in the past two years, 29 EUR/USD for others.
- 99 EUR/USD instead of 149 (33% off) for registered customers until January 31st.
- 119 EUR/USD instead of 149 (20% off) until January 31st for new customers.
- Energy Pack bundle: 299 EUR/USD instead of 399 (25% off) until January 31st

Upgrade & customer offers are sent by email, as usual.

More details about the plug-in, videos and demo downloads can be found on the MB-5 Dynamix multiband processor page.

What's New:
-Fully redesigned algorithms with improved performance and precision.
-External side chain input.
-Control the maximum gain reduction or increase for each band using the new "Depth" parameter.
-Brand new GUI design, with improved usability and touchscreen support.
-The GUI can now be zoomed from 70% to 200%.
-Lock the GUI state to prevent changes when loading presets.
-Faster GUI loading / instantaneous GUI display after it has been opened once.
-Adjust contrast for spectrogram display.
-Spectrogram now keeps history when resized.
-Brand new presets manager with MIDI program and bank messages support, copy/paste.
-Added presets managers for individual bands and dynamics curve settings.
-Now supports retina displays on Mac (text and graphs using high resolution).
-VST3 plug-in format support.
-New installer on Mac.
-Changed demo limitations: up to 5 instances allowed, bypass time changed to half a second, and bypass parameter is not affected anymore.
-License is now shared between plug-ins types (register only once for all formats).
-Dropped support for Windows XP and Mac OS X 10.6 and earlier.
-Dropped support for legacy RTAS and DirectX plug-ins formats.

Also, the regular price has dropped to 149 EUR/USD (instead of 199 for version 1).

Enjoy!

[SeeingInMidi]

Nice release! Is this capable of creating aggressive up upward/downward OTT like compression?

[Blue Cat Audio]

Yes of course (it has a two threshold system).

[Tappistry]

I dunno guys, I think I need more control over how the individual bands are triggered.


Seriously though, this is a great upgrade. The new depth parameter is interesting ... I'm gonna watch your new intro videos and see if I can learn a little more about it. The new interface layout is excellent and much easier (for me) to follow. I'll be using this much more in the future!

[sinkmusic]

Very nice update !

[Blue Cat Audio]

Glad that you like it! There are actually a few more controls that we could add for each band, but the GUI is already quite busy as is

[SeeingInMidi]

The CPU consumption seems pretty high for even just using 3 bands. Are there going to be CPU optimization improvements?

[Tappistry]

The CPU consumption seems pretty high for even just using 3 bands. Are there going to be CPU optimization improvements?

How much are you seeing?

I have an i7-8700k and 16 gigs of RAM. When I engage a 3-band instance, the performance meter in Reaper shows usage of about 0.27%.

[SeeingInMidi]

The CPU consumption seems pretty high for even just using 3 bands. Are there going to be CPU optimization improvements?

How much are you seeing?

I have an i7-8700k and 16 gigs of RAM. When I engage a 3-band instance, the performance meter in Reaper shows usage of about 0.27%.

I own an i7-3930k and 16 gigs of ram. With 3 bands engaged, and with up and down compression engaged, i get a reported CPU usage of around 4%. I'm comparing it to xfer OTT which Studio One reports that it's using less than 1%.

Edit: MB-5 with 5 bands engaged can rise up all the way up to 7% of CPU usage in Studio One

[Blue Cat Audio]

This is strange. Are you maybe using another plug-in before the MB-5 Dynamix that could generate denormals?

[SeeingInMidi]

Could it be because i'm using the trial version? I'm testing it in a blank project and I'm still running into CPU issues.

[Blue Cat Audio]

No i don't think the demo version changes anything (unless you notice that CPU spikes occur when the plug-in gets bypassed?)

[SeeingInMidi]

No i don't think the demo version changes anything (unless you notice that CPU spikes occur when the plug-in gets bypassed?)

Ill do some more testing and on different DAWs. I really would love to use this efficiently. Its a pretty unique dynamic processor.

[SeeingInMidi]

I've tested the plugin in Reaper, I'm getting a reported low CPU usage of around .3%. It seems like it's Studio One 3 issue. I'm not sure if it's my end if Studio One is naturally being a CPU hog.

[Tappistry]

I've tested the plugin in Reaper, I'm getting a reported low CPU usage of around .3%. It seems like it's Studio One 3 issue. I'm not sure if it's my end if Studio One is naturally being a CPU hog.

I'm not sure if it's Studio One being a CPU hog as much as it is just being temperamental with this particular plugin for the moment.

Out of curiosity, have you tried any other Blue Cat plugins in Studio One?