Plugindoctor manual (v2)

Thanks for using Plugindoctor! While the user interface is hopefully designed in
a way that the basic usage is more or less self-explaining, this manual should
provide you with some more detailed info on what is actually being analyzed in
all the different subsections. It is assumed that the reader has a basic
understanding of digital signal processing; expressions like "phase response"
or "harmonic content" will be used without further definition.

General usage:

Since v2, Plugindoctor can be installed as a standalone app, but also as an

audio plugin (in VST, VST3, AU and AAX format). Both versions can load VST,
VST3 and AU plugins (OSX only for the latter, of course). AAX plugins can NOT
be loaded, due to legal restrictions. In the standalone version, Plugindoctor can
also be used to add external hardware devices, see below for more detail. You
should find separate 32 and 64 bit versions of the standalone app after
installation, which can be used to analyze 32 and 64 bit plugins, respectively.
The plugin versions will be available in 32 and 64 bit format by default. Please
note that from OSX 10.15 or higher, only the 64 bit version will be installed on
your Mac.

Two plugins can be loaded simultaneously, for easy comparison between

different algorithms. You can select whether you want to see the results from
each plugin independently, or the difference between the two plugins.
Whenever you load a new plugin, the first empty plugin slot will be filled first.
If both slots are already full (i.e. if you are already analyzing two plugins), you
will be asked which of the two should be unloaded and replaced with the new
plugin.

When using the plugin version of Plugindoctor (PD), you can analyze plugins in
the same way as you are doing it in the standalone version, but at the same
time you can listen to whatever a specific plugin is doing to your actual
material that you are sending through it in your DAW. If no plugin is loaded at
all in PD's plugin version, the DAW audio will just go right through it. If you
have two plugins loaded in the plugin version of PD, you will see the results of
the measurements of both plugins simultaneously, but only one of the plugins
will be used at a time to receive the audio that your DAW is sending. In the
plugin version, you can select which of the two loaded plugins is being used for
your DAW material by toggling "Play #1" or "Play #2" in the top row of PD's
UI. That option will only appear if you actually have two plugins loaded. That
way you can quickly A/B two plugins (or two instances of the same plugin, but
with different settings) and hear the difference while inspecting what the plugin
is doing in Plugindoctor.

Plugins can be loaded either directly from disk, or via a plugin browser. The
latter is shown by clicking on the library/book symbol in the upper right corner.
Initially, it will be empty. You can use either the "Scan" button to perform a
global scan of all supported formats (recommended to quickly populate the
plugin browser) or make more specific scans via the "Options" menu, which
also allows you to remove selected plugins from the list. Once you have a list
of plugins in your browser, simply load one by selecting it and clicking the
"Load plugin" button, or by double-clicking on the plugin name in the list.

Alternatively, if you want to load a plugin directly from a location on your

harddisk, use one of the two "Load plugin (file)" buttons. Either way, once you
have selected a plugin for analysis, its name will be displayed in the selected
slot in the top row (#1 or #2), and its window will pop up, and the analysis
signal will be routed through the plugin's in- and outputs. Analysis can be
interrupted for each of the slots by clicking on the „M“ button next to the
plugin's name in the top row. To remove a plugin from analysis, click the „X“
button.
The plugin window can be closed by either clicking the close button on the
plugin window or the eye symbol in the upper right corner of Plugindoctor. A
second click on the eye symbol will display a closed plugin window again. If
two plugins are loaded, clicking the eye symbol will close all open plugin
windows if there are any, or reopen both of them if both are closed.

The camera symbol lets you take a snapshot of Plugindoctor. A file browser will
pop up, which will let you choose the location and the name of the generated
PNG file.

The button to the right of the Camera button lets you switch between parallel
and substracted serial operation when you have two plugins loaded. When the
button shows 1|2 , the output of both plugins will be shown in separate curve.
When clicking on the button, the display on the button will change to 1-2,
which means that you will now only see a single curve, which is obtained by
first sending the analysis signal through plugin #1, then, phase-inverted,
through plugin #2. This mode lets you easily dial in a close match between two
plugins.

The LR/MS button lets you switch the analysis mode between Left/Right and
Mid/Side. Many plugins offer a dedicated Mid-Side mode, or are constructed as
Mid-Side plugins in the first place. In Mid-Side mode the two curves you will
see in most of the analysis windows represent the mid and the side signal,
whereas in Left-Right mode the two curves will represent the left and the right
channel (provided your plugin is not a mono plugin, in which case there will be
nothing displayed in Mid-Side mode because that approach requires a two
channel plugin).

Finally, the settings symbol will open up the "Settings" window (also explained
in more detail below).

Zooming and changing axis scale

You can zoom into all graphs except in "Performance". Zooming can be done in
two ways: first, you can select a rectangle with your mouse, starting in the
upper left corner, will draw the selected rectangle while dragging the mouse in
the lower right direction, and zoom into the corresponding regions upon
releasing the mouse button. Zoom out again by clicking and dragging into the
upper-left direction.
Second, you can also zoom and move the whole graph using your mouse
wheel. Place the mouse cursor to the left of the graph to affect the y-axis, or to
the bottom of the graph to affect the x-axis. Simple mouse wheel scrolling will
move the graph along the desired axis, while holding down the CTRL button
will zoom in or out along the axis. To reset everything, drag a rectangle from
lower left to upper right corner using your mouse again.

The different modes of analysis

Plugindoctor has a range of different analysis modes which can be accessed via
the orange tab buttons. Those modes are explained in detail below.

Linear analysis

This section features two modes of input signals for the analysis ("Delta" and
"Random"), and two modes of analyzing a plugin's response ("Magnitude" and
"Phase"). "Delta" refers to the input signal being a so-called delta peak, which
means the first sample is (usually) equal to 1, all the other samples are zero.
This input signal contains a flat contribution of all admissible frequencies, i.e. if
you would send this signal through a frequency analyzer, you'd get a flat curve
when looking at the magnitudes of the contributing frequencies, and also a flat
curve when looking at the phase response. This means that all deviations from
a flat curve come from the plugin being analyzed.
The "dB" slider lets you adjust the height of the delta peak, where a value of 0
dB corresponds to a digital sample value of 1.
"Random" will send white noise with a maximum peak level of 0 dB through
the plugin. This signal has a flat frequency response too, but only if you
average it over a sufficiently long time. The phase response, on the other
hand, is flucuating randomly.
Concerning the analysis of the output signal, "Magnitude" will display the
absolute values of the contributing frequency components in the Fourier-
transformed output of the plugin being tested, while "Phase" will display the
corresponding phase response. The default FFT size is 16384 samples. This
size can be increased twice- or fourfold in the "Settings" window (see
discussion further below).

In the linear analysis window, a curve can be stored pressing the "Store"
button and will then continue to be displayed when the loaded plugin's
parameters are being changed or a new plugin is being loaded, for easy
comparison between settings or plugins. "Clear" will remove this stored curve
again.

Harmonic analysis

The aim of looking at the harmonic response of a plugin is to see the response
of a plugin when it is being fed with a signal of precisely defined frequency
content (as opposed to the delta peak from the linear section).

a: Single frequency mode

Here we have the choice between two different methods of harmonic analysis:
"THD" (total harmonic distortion) and "IMD" (intermodular distortion). In THD
mode, the input signal consists of a pure sine wave (the frequency and
intensity of which can be changed in the "Settings"). The amplitude and
frequency of the input wave can be adjusted using the horizontal "dB" and "Hz"
slider, respectively. The output will typically consist of a large peak at the input
frequency plus, if the plugin generates harmonic content due to a nonlinear
algorithm, one or more peaks, typically at integer multiples of the input
frequency (higher harmonics). When aliasing occurs, higher harmonics that are
theoretically higher than the Nyquist frequency are being produced, which will
be reflected off the Nyquist frequency's location and lead to additional peaks at
non-integer values of the input frequency.
Apart from visually inspecting the resulting signal, two measures of the
distortion generated by the plugin are being displayed in this mode, which will
be shown in the upper right corner of the graph: THD and THD+N. THD is
defined as the inverse ratio of the magnitude of the input sine signal and the
summed magnitudes of the peaks at integer multiples of the input frequency.
THD+N is the inverse ratio of the magnitude of the input signal and the
magnitude of "everything else", which includes all higher harmonics but also
everything in between.

"IMD" mode uses two input frequencies, a low and a high one, with an
intensity difference of 12 dB, i.e. the lower frequency comes in a 0 dB, the
higher at -12 dB. The lower input frequency is set to 60 Hz, the higher
frequency to 7000 Hz. If the plugin is creating additional harmonic content,
this will now not only show up in higher harmonics of the two input
frequencies, but also in modulated peaks of the higher frequency by the lower
one: you will see a peak at 60 Hz, a peak at 7000 Hz and, if there is
intermodular distortion, several peaks at 7000 +- N*60 Hz. Plugindoctor
calculates a numerical value for IMD by dividing the RMS-summed
contributions of 10 modulated peak lower than 7000 Hz and 10 modulated
peak higher than 7000 Hz (all peaks with a 60 Hz distance between 6400 Hz
and 7600 Hz) by the magnitude of the incoming 7000 Hz peak.

b: Sweep mode

• 1D: In this mode, the reponse of the tested plugin is measured over a
whole range of excitation frequencies: toggle the "sweep" button and
Plugindoctor will continuously sweep from low to high frequencies, with
an amplitude you can choose with the "dB" slider. You will note that the
button that, before toggling the "sweep" button, was used to switch
between THD and IMD, now lets you choose between THD and
fundamental. Set it to THD, and Plugindoctor will calculate the THD
response per frequency. Set it to fundamental, and you will see the gain
or reduction in dB of the currently applied single frequency wave. For
strictly linear plugins, this reponse will be identical to the results from
the "Linear" section; as soon as nonlinearities come into play, the two
measurements are usually different. The lowest frequency is defined by
having to fit 10 oscillations into the audio buffer that's used for
measurement, so it will be influenced by both your sample rate and your
quality settings (the latter is changing the buffer size). Please note that,
for the THD calculation, the results will go to zero as the sweep
frequency approaches ¼ of the sample rate, as there will be no more
higher harmonics left between the applied frequency and the Nyquist
frequency (½ the sample rate).
 Figure 1: 2D sweep with exponential (left) and linear (right) sine frequency increase, and
clearly visible harmonics at integer multiples of the fundamental frequency.

• 2D: In the two-dimensional sweep scan, the test signal is also a

(roughly 6 seconds long) sine sweep, but the result is plotted both as a
function of time (along the x axis) and of frequency (along the y axis). To
be precise, the two-dimensional colour plot shows the log-abs of the
Fourier transform of a series of time-shifted and time-windowed
responses of the tested plugin as the applied test frequency is increased.
You should usually see the fundamental frequency as a red line, and
depending on the plugin producing higher harmonics, you should see one
or more lines above the fundamental frequency. The most interesting
part is that you can use the 2D plot to quickly spot aliasing: any of the
additional frequency lines that hit the upper border of the frequency
spectrum (defined by the Nyquist frequency) and then gets reflected
when the fundamental frequency is increased further is a sign of aliasing.
Please keep in mind that the colour scale is logarithmic here: there is a
difference of (by default) -200 dB between the highest (red) colour and
the lowest (blue) colour. You can select the low (f1) and high (f2)
frequency of the sweep, and switch between linear and exponential
frequency increase using the Lin/Exp switch. Only one plugin at a time is
displayed here, if you have two plugins loaded (or are using external
hardware), you can select which of the results you want to see from a
drop-down menu.

Oscilloscope: the oscilloscope window displays the audio signal coming out of
the plugin, with a sine wave as input signal. This mode is useful for precisely
looking at possible deformations of a sine wave due to, e.g. a very fast
compressor or a distortion plugin. There are two ways to display the audio
data: when "Time" is selected using the button in the upper right corner, the x-
axis will display the time in seconds, while the y-axis shows the audio signal
coming out of the plugin. When "Wavesh." is selected, the x-axis corresponds
to the audio signal going into the plugin, while the y-axis corresponds to the
outgoing signal again. This mode is useful to see how the plugin shapes the
incoming audio. In waveshaping mode, a slider can be used to adjust the delay
in samples between the in- and outgoing audio data on display. It is set to the
latency that's reported by the plugin per default, but delays can occur even
with a plugin that officially has a latency of zero samples, due to nonlinear
phase effects. Amplitude and frequency of the test signal can be adjusted
using the two respective sliders.

Dynamics looks at a plugin's reaction to varying input levels. Again, the input
signal is a single sine wave whose frequency can be changed in the settings.
There are two modes here: "Ramp" and "Attack/Release". In "Ramp" mode,
the plugin is sequentially fed a sinewave (of selectable frequency) with an
input level increasing (by default) from -100 dB to 0 dB in steps of 1 dB, and
then returning to -100 dB in an endless loop. The level of the sine wave is held
constant for 16384 (quality: normal), 2*16384 (quality: higher) or 4*16384
(quality: highest) samples, with the quality being adjustable in the "Settings"
section. The maximum amplitude of the plugin's output signal is recorded and
displayed as a function of the input signal. Using the respective editable labels
in the Dynamics tab, you can change the default ramp parameters.
In Attack-Release mode, the plugin is being fed a sequence of three sine wave
with three different levels. The lengths for which each of the three waves is
present, as well as their levels, can again be changed in "Settings". Typically,
one would look at a certain time span with an input level below a compressor's
threshold, then a certain time span above the threshold, and again a third time
span below the threshold. By looking at the displayed output signal of the
plugin that is being fed this type of signal, one can see how fast a compressor
reacts when the signal exceeds its threshold ("attack") or when the signal falls
back below the threshold ("release").

Hammerstein: this tab provides a more detailed look at the nonlinear

behaviour of a plugin or a piece of hardware. Briefly speaking, the
Hammerstein model tries to fit the system under investigation with a power
series, with each component of the series multiplied by its own linear filter. You
can select the order of the power series, with a maximum of 7 allowed.
That way you can see not only how much a certain higher harmonic (say, x^3)
is contributing to the signal, but also how its response is different across
different frequencies.
Technically, the Hammerstein model consists of the diagonal terms of the
corresponding Volterra kernel. This manual is not the right place to provide a
more detailed explanation, I'd kindly refer you to
https://ant-novak.com/pages/sss/ for a more detailed explanation of the
underlying analysis method.

Performance: this module measures the time spent in a plugin's processing

callback as the number of samples the plugin is processing. There will be some
fluctuation due to the varying CPU load of your computer, but generally it will
give you a good idea whether your plugin compares favourably with other
plugins doing comparable processing tasks, or whether there are specific
sample sizes which take more time than they should (maybe due to
reallocations).

The Settings page (which you can reach via the button with the standard
settings symbol in the upper right corner of Plugindoctor) lets you control a
number of values that are being used in the analysis and when displaying the
results:

• the first row lets you select the overall sample rate
• in the next row, "quality" refers to both the global buffer size, and the
FFT size being used in "Linear" and "Harmonic". "Normal" corresponds to
16384 samples, with "Higher" and "Highest" increasing this number by a
factor of 2 each.
• the "Speed" dropdown menu lets you adjust the processing speed: by
default, Plugindoctor shoots as many samples per time to the plugin as
possible, which means it is way faster than realtime. This might
sometimes lead to an unusual flickering on the UI of some plugins, and
of course also to a high CPU consumption. For this reason, you can slow
Plugindoctor down: a bit counterintuitive, "Realtime" is the slowest
option where the plugin gets exactly as many samples per second as
dictated by the sampling frequency. From there, you can increase the
speed in three steps, until "ultra" is again as fast as possible.
• You can select between three slightly different background colour
schemes using the following three buttons.
• The next six buttons (3x2) let you choose the colours for the various
curves PluginDoctor will display (the text on the buttons is hopefully self-
explaining)...
• "Load last plugin on start" will let you start a new PluginDoctor session
with the same plugin(s) loaded as when you last closed PluginDoctor.
• "Save as default" makes Plugindoctor use the currently selected settings
as default.
• If you want to analyze external audio hardware (available in the
standalone version only!), please click the "Show audio hardware
settings" button to properly route your signal to and from the external
device.

Hardware analysis (standalone version)

To analyzer external audio hardware like an outboard EQ or compressor, you

need to attach the hardware gear to your audio interface, with one output
going from the interface to the hardware's input (can be mono or stereo) and
the output from the hardware going back to an input channel of your audio
interface. In Plugindoctor's settings, use the "Show audio hardware settings"
dialog to select the in- and output of your interface that you have used to
connect the piece of hardware. On Windows, you can also choose which driver
you want to use: DirectSound, Windows Audio or ASIO (if your device supports
the latter). Please make sure to use the same sample rate in the hardware
settings dialog that you've also chosen in Plugindoctor's settings, otherwise
you'll get incorrect results.
Once everything is set up, simply toggle the "Use hardware" button in the
upper right corner of Plugindoctor and all analysis signals will be routed
through your hardware chain. From here on, all analysis will be performed in
exactly the same way as if you were analysing an audio plugin. To stop
analyzing your hardware and go back to plugin analysis, just toggle the "Use
hardware" button again and select a plugin to analyze as usual.
Your hardware loop will inevitably have a non-zero latency, which will have an
effect on the calculated phase response in the linear analysis section. This
phase response is real, in the sense that the delay is actually taking place
when you are integrating your outboard gear. Nevertheless, you might be
interested in the latency-corrected phase response. For this purpose, click the
"Adjust HW latency" button, wait one or two second, and the latency of your
whole hardware chain will be taken into account. This needs to be redone when
changing the sampling frequency.

Should any questions remain, or problems pop up during the usage of

Plugindoctor, please do not hesitate to contact [email protected]!