I mean, we didn't even need to know that. Duck buddy is inherently funny to say.

@@therealquade Duck Buddy: Your friend with benefits!

Ah so glad to see you say this, been saying this about other plugins too that recently got pretty hyped (remember that NANI saturation plugin with it's h3nt@i plugin GUI?), like we don't need that crap in audio plugins.

🙌

‘Duck Buddy’ is so much funnier.

Yes I'm glad you saw this and thankyou for the nice comment. You're the only person so far who has realised that this can be used as a transient shaper :)

@@Slynk Can i ask, how do you turn it into a transient shaper?

@@lolgamercz8124 probably just put it on the drum track and sidechain to ghost notes?

@@tobyarmstrong5450 thank you it works.

😀

My exact train of thought right before we started working on this project LOL!

@@Slynk and that Mixed View... like seriously this can't be free, it's too good!

@@apoplexiamusic feel free to show your monetary support with one of the links in the description!

My absolute pleasure. From this day fourth, may sidechain compression suck less for everyone! For FREE!

VSTs are somewhat limited in how they can interact with the DAW, since it's a generic standard that's compatible across multiple DAWs. I'm sure the designers of these tools don't _want_ to have to use these awkward workflows, but they have to make do with what's available via the interface. Since Max4Live integrates more tightly with Live, it has access to more information. In particular, as of Live 11 they added lagless binding to MIDI inputs from arbitrary tracks, which is the magic sauce that allows Duck Buddy to do its thing. That and M4L lets us integrate the plugin UI directly into the fx chain, which is quite nice, since it makes it feel more like a native plugin. The downside of course is that it limits it to just Live 11 Suite users, but for that group of users, it's a really convenient workflow.

Yeah we would love to be able to make something like this available to producers in any daw but we don't believe it is possible. I'm hoping this plugin helps to shake things up a bit and maybe the creators of some of these vsts will start thinking about ways to get around these limitations to bring about a better workflow for their vst sidechainers.

I've read that the VST3 format allows plugins to share information between one other, so you could theoretically have a VST on one track that detects a MIDI or audio signal, and a VST on another track that takes the trigger and acts on it.

yeah, it's an ableton limitation with how they implement midi routing in audio effects - it's annoying that it requires extra steps like this. Some other DAWs do a better job at this. Ableton has improved sidechain audio routing in effects plugins in these more recent versions. That used to be just as annoyingly implemented.

It would be possible... there's a few approaches I usually end up with a folded away group of midi tracks that take input from my kick and output to shaperbox on each of my main groups. But, it's still an extra fiddly step when I add a group etc. I must remember to create a new midi track, set source, set destination, set it to "input" - it's not a massive deal for me, but still, it's not as fast as "copy and paste the device and the routing just keeps working" some ideas for work arounds.. 1- create a dummy midi port to send out your sidechain source info (be careful as this would require setting up manually if you were to open this project on another computer) 2- some plugins have built in communication between instances (eg. Izotope neutron/ozone) - so it would be possible for a ducking vst to do that... have a listening plugin, and then each ducking plugin can automatically receive that signal. 3- implement tricks with maxforlive to route midi instead. Basically, it's building your own way of routing the midi where it needs to go rather than using the default tools provided by ableton. The limitation is basically "you must ^send^ midi to that specific instance of the plugin" you can't set the plugin to "^listen^ to that specific source" It doesn't help that ableton doesn't like transmitting midi down through a plugin chain (something other DAWs like Bitwig can do) - once it hits the instrument, the midi dies and only the audio proceeds. Eg. in bitwig I can quickly have effects that have keyboard tracking - they have different values with high notes than low notes. Among many other things, but I digress. To do such things in ableton currently would require a whole lot more tedious steps and planning.

Exactly! The velocity feature is super handy right!? I almost never bother with velocity on my drums but now I think I will use it more often with this improved sidechain workflow.

Haha thanks!