Plugin oversampling enhancements

Plugin oversampling allows you to 2x, 4x, 8x, or 16x upsample any effects or instruments in the project to take advantage of higher sample rate processing without raising the actual project sample rate which can increase CPU load. By upsampling only plugins that benefit from high sample rates, you can keep your CPU load down while taking advantage of any sonic advantages of higher sample rate processing. Plugin oversampling automatically upsamples the data sent to the specified plugins and then downsamples the output back to the project sample rate. You can choose to do this in realtime during playback or only at render time.

Support for 2x, 4x, 8x and 16x oversampling

To globally enable/disable oversampling for a plugin:

1.	Open the VST plugin's property page.

2.	Click the VST2/VST3 drop-down menu in the VST plugin toolbar and point to Oversampling, select Enable for Render or Enable for Playback, then select the desired oversampling factor (2x, 4x, 8x, or 16x). The corresponding sample rate is shown in parenthesis.

These options globally persist for all instances of the plugin in all projects, so it only needs to be set once per plugin.

 

Caution: Sample rates higher than 192 kHz may have compatibility issues with certain plugins.

To globally enable/disable oversampling for plugins that already have oversampling enabled, click the Enable/Bypass Plugin Oversampling button in the Control Bar’s Mix module. Oversampling is enabled when the button is lit.

Figure 16. The Mix module.

Oversampling precision

Plugin oversampling uses very high quality resampling which may be overkill for playback and is a bit CPU intensive. To reduce the CPU load, the Precision submenu allows you to set multipliers for the resampling sinc size, which results in more efficient playback:

Low: The bandwidth is limited to 1/8 of the selected sample rate (for example, 6 KHz @48000). Low mode allows for significant CPU savings.

Medium (default): The bandwidth is limited to 1/4 of the selected sample rate, which is more than enough for playback.

High: The bandwidth is limited to 1/2 of the selected sample rate.

Highest: Full bandwidth. The Highest' quality mode improves audio precision with higher-order windowed- sine resampling of waveforms and noise-shaped dithering.

FX Rack tooltip indicates if oversampling is enabled

When hovering over a plugin name in an FX rack, the tooltip shows the current rate if oversampling is enabled. This allows you to quickly verify if a plugin is being oversampled.

Improvements to phase accuracy

Prior to Sonar, oversampling could introduce an uncompensated phase offset in the oversampled data of around 150 samples, which could lead to phase problems when playing back the oversampled track along with the rest of the project, unless the track data was manually offset. This issue has been corrected and oversampling is fully phase accurate now with no delay in processing. See the up-sampled click track below.

Handle oversampling for FX Chains and ProChannel FX Chains

Oversampling is now supported for plugins in FX Chains and ProChannel FX Chains.

Misc. improvements

The oversampling engine has been updated for greater accuracy and several issues have been addressed.

Problems with bouncing oversampled plugins where the bounce settings differ from playback have been addressed.

Plugin oversampling can now be enabled while effect and instrument sidechaining is in use.

 

Note: Enabling oversampling during playback can put a high demand on your CPU. If you experience dropouts or other issues, use oversampling only on render.

 

See:

Plug-in oversampling on bounce/freeze/export

Mix module

New features