Crystality Plugin 0.92 review
DownloadCrystality Plugin consists of XMMS plugin and stdin/stdout plugin
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Crystality Plugin consists of XMMS plugin and stdin/stdout plugin. It was written for realtime remastering of sound from mp3 files.
You will need a reasonably good stereo and a good ear to notice quality
improvement, otherwise this is not for you.
This plugin tries to patch mp3 format flaws, not a poor audio hardware! Yes, you should be able to hear well enough (sorry) - for some of my friends plugin is a cool thing, while the others does not hear nothing but echo and stereo expander (well, you will hear every effect if you set it to the maximum, but it will not sound nice).
Crystality was written for 16bit 44.1kHz stereo sound and may give strange results
with other sound formats.
Damian Hodgkiss sent me a quick port for Winamp 2.x. I have not tried it yet, but you can get it (cr-quick-winamp-port.zip).
This plugin does mainly four things (and some minor tricks):
1. Adds some sounds in very high frequency range. Most of the mp3s in The Net are flawed with a 16(15?) kHz cutoff. Even these ones compressed at high bitrates. This spectrum hole is audible and very unpleasant. This plugin helps a bit. Old mp3s made from the vinyl or the magnetic tape may also sound better with these "steroids". For old mp3s you'll probably need to set filter to 0.1.
2. Adds some even harmonic distortions (actually nonlinearity), that sounds nice. Valve amps introduce even harmonic distortions (although differnt way) Look at audiophile pages for more info (well, mp3 format is not an audiophile stuff at all, but... welcome to the real world...).
3. Adds simple, but nice 3D echo (concert hall or church like). Most of echo plugins sounds too hard and aggresively for me. This one does not.
4. Extends stereo.
USING:
There are currently two versions of plugin - XMMS plugin and stdin/stdout. Stdin/out plugin is completly independent of XMMS plugin. It even stores its configuration in a separate file (~/.crystalityrc). Stdin/out plugin is alpha code, so some features are missed. You cannot reopen configuration dialog after closing without restarting plugin, there are no "save config", "load config" buttons. Configuration is loaded automatically on startup and saved on exit, either on normal finish or ^C. You can disable GUI with -g option (useful in scripts).
Because this plugin adds some sounds at high frequencies, you will probably need to decrease treble level on your amplifier. Plugin does not perform normalization, so you should slightly decrease signal level in XMMS equalizer (NOT volume slider on the main panel). Setting sliders to the maximum is generally a bad idea (well, except the filter, where that setting is useful).
PERFORMANCE:
It eats about 15% of CPU on my AMD K6-2/400 and optimization is still possible, this is not highly optimized code.
INSTALLATION:
Distribution contains binary version of XMMS plugin library and stdin/stdout plugin executable (Linux i586, glibc 2.1.3). You may copy plugin library file (libcrystality.so) into XMMS's Effect directory and executable (crystality-stdio) to /usr/local/bin or any location you prefer. For default locations simply type:
make install
and that's it.
You may also build crystality from the source.
make buildinstall
typed as root in the source directory should be all you have to do.
This plugin was my first small step in gtk programming, so don't expect any wonders, GUI is actually a quick hack to hardcoded settings. I am not a GUI programmer.
Requirements:
XMMS
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