With the support of iLok, more tips & tricks from the community. Community member Richard Shapiro has been in touch to let us know about an issue with some of the Sonnox plug-ins when going between AAX Native and DSP. Richard says….
If you start a session on an HDX system and use Sonnox AAX DSP plug-ins when you move that session to a HD Native system Pro Tools will not automatically open the EQ plug-ins into AAX Native. It makes it inactive and says that “the plug-in can not be found”.
However, you can click on the insert and re-instantiate the EQ to restore all the settings but it switches the ‘Type’ selector to 4. Type 4 has much wider Qs and will make everything sound really off if you were using type-1. I have also noticed that this is not always the case. Sometime it will remain correct on ‘Type-1’ if lets say you are only using the roll-off.
I have also noticed with the EQ that if you use the ‘A’ and ‘B’ setting to create different EQ settings that if you leave it on ‘B’ and close and reopen the session it will revert to ‘A’. This doesn’t seem to be DSP or Native dependent like the other issue.
Sonnox responded to Richard with this email.….
“I confirm that the Oxford EQ will always open with ‘A’ settings, even where the session itself was saved with ‘B’ selected. I appreciate this is far from ideal. We are aware that many engineers use A and B switches to compare A (with settings) to B (set to default flat settings) to provide glitchless IN/OUT comparisons. Nonetheless, we are looking at how we can overcome this in a future update release.
There is also a known issue with moving sessions from Pro Tools Native to HDX systems. Sessions created on an HDX system will not load Oxford plug-ins on a Pro Tools Native rig, unless the Native rig also has the AAX DSP version of plug-in installed. In this case, the AAX DSP plug-in will default to Native mode on the Native rig. This works in most cases, but not where the HDX Oxford EQ or Dynamics has been inserted as a variant version, ie. EQ 3-band, 5-band or Filters-only. Pro Tools will indicate that the plug-in was made inactive. In the session, you will see a ‘Plug-in Inactive’ window where the plug-in once was shown. The original plug-in will appear at the insert greyed out and in italics. If you click on the dot to the left of the plug-in name, and select the appropriate Native version, the settings will be restored into the Native plug-in. Unfortunately, any automation data saved with the original plug-in will be lost.
We understand that a forthcoming release of Pro Tools 11 will provide closer compatibility between HDX and AAX Native systems in this regard, although the performance of DSP variants translating to a full Native equivalents is at yet unknown.
I’m sorry that I cannot bring more positive news on these points, but I hope this clarifies the current situation.”
We reached out to Sonnox for comment, who confirmed that their statement was valid one month ago. Sonnox found it difficult to comment further as, of course, they are under NDA with Avid. However we understand that Sonnox is working closely with Avid with this issue in mind. It is good to see Sonnox take their customers concerns seriously and we look forward to a solution very soon.
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