Waves’ StudioVerse promises thousands of sounds and chains from some of the industry’s finest, with new ways to find them. With the potential for mixers to create and share their own as well, we check out Waves’ plugin community for the StudioRack ecosystem.
In Summary
Waves StudioVerse is an online library of audio plugin chains authored by big names and the wider community. To use with Waves’ StudioRack plugin chainer, StudioVerse is searchable using tags and keywords. Most significantly it can listen to the music and match candidates using its Musical AI technology. Users can create and upload their own chains as well.
Going Deeper
Presets And AI - The Good, The Bad, And The Rest
Speak to most engineers, and they will have an opinion on the virtues or drawbacks of both the use of presets and that of AI for audio mixing purposes. For most, both present the single question: “Do I want to decide/do it myself, or do I want someone or something else to decide/do it for me?”.
Presets
For the pro, many can save time by not going down the road of having to dial out a preset that doesn’t know what the music needs. Indeed these are the people who might find themselves authoring the presets rather than using them. For newbies, however, presets can provide a good insight into what appropriate treatments can look like. As their skills grow, they can find their own way and maybe end up authoring a few themselves in the long run.
AI
While this technology cannot actually know what it is doing, it can draw upon existing information to make useful suggestions. Up until now, the most common type of input has been text, however anything that has been distilled into pure information can be processed, including images and audio.
We have seen a number of AI-enhanced audio plugins starting to make inroads with the processing itself, but AI also presents other possibilities. Using it to listen to music, and wrangle potential presets from one place means that any community-based collection can be used to the full.
Waves StudioVerse
StudioRack is Waves’ virtual rack for its audio plugins, which can be used in whole chains in one place for custom processing paths.
The recent introduction of the StudioVerse extension for StudioRack means that AI can now be used to search a vast number of Waves artist and community authored presets. Tags and keywords can also be used, but perhaps most impressive is StudioVerse’s AI-powered Scan feature. This uses musically-aware machine learning to ingest and establish a track or mix’s Audio ID and instantly recommend mixing chains that could work. Users can also upload their own chains to the StudioVerse cloud for others to discover and use.
StudioVerse In Use
In the video we use StudioVerse to find sounds to load into StudioRack. We show how text-based searches can be used to get results using keywords and/or tags arranged by things such as source name, style, plugin, or era. We then use StudioVerse’s party piece: Scan. Using Waves’ Musical AI, Scan listens to the source and assigns a unique Audio ID to it to match with other scanned sources in StudioVerse. We also show how easy it is to create and share brand new chains for the community to use in their own mixes.
Final Thoughts
Historically, presets have brought some notable drawbacks for newbies. Pre-dialled sounds that run the risk of fighting against the music aren’t unheard of, and that’s assuming that the user knows what something like “2A_Destruction” even means in the first place. For the pro, many have found that using their own or starting out from scratch is more useful than ironing out arbitrary moves that belong to another song.
In StudioVerse, Waves have tried to address some of the niggles that can come with using presets, such as settings that are wrong for the song, or impossible to find in the first place. Its tagging and AI listening chops set out to fix that once and for all, and for the most part it can make useful suggestions. Of course these can only ever be subjective, but they can provide a solid basis to start. StudioRack’s friendly macros mean that users need only make the most general of tweaks - after all, those who like to tweak from the ground up are already well catered for in the wider Waves universe.
Coupled with a deep cache of sounds that can be called up by anyone with an internet connection, StudioVerse promises to give meaning to presets for newbies, and an audience to pros willing to share (almost) all of their secrets…
A Word About This Article
As the Experts team considered how we could better help the community we thought that some of you are time poor and don’t have the time to read a long article or a watch a long video. In 2023 we are going to be trying out articles that have the fast takeaway right at the start and then an opportunity to go deeper if you wish. Let us know if you like this idea in the comments.