Rockster Plus Pro

I recently put my hands on a copy of Rockster Plus Pro, version 1.53 courtesy of the the folks at Born To Rock (http://www.borntorock.com). The out of box experience is pretty good. The GUI is attractive and the use is pretty self explanatory. Open a WAV file, click on one of the presets, click on "Test", see if you like it. If it's close but not quite there click on whatever you think may improve matters, and try again. If it got worse, hit the starting preset again and repeat. Once you've got something that you like, hit "Final" and your newly processed tune is saved. You can also save off your favorite settings into a customer "Venue" file, and pull them in later.

The download comes with a Venues file that includes a bunch of other presets to try. The Venues come in "Larger" and "Smaller" (Yes, that much I was able to follow thank you very much), but the files were listed out as "1minus" "2minus" etc in the "Smaller" venue folder, and "1plus" "2plus" and so forth in the "Larger Venues" folder, and that part seemed a bit oblique to me. To be honest, I found it a bit cumbersome to deal with those, and as there wasn't much documentation I mostly focused on creating my own "Venues" from the presets that are built in.

I played with all of the presets, and found that I'm a bit partial to #7 which produces output files called "t6321d3211m6321h5d5s5y.wav" no matter what the input file's name. That's probably my key gripe, as it makes things a bit awkward if you're mixing and matching different names for source files as there's no indication of the track name in the output file. However you DO have an extremely detailed record of where the knobs were set when you saved the file. "t6321d3211m6321h5d5s5y" means the following: "t" is for "time" followed by the settings for "Rear", "Side", "Ceiling", and "Audience". "d" is for "Decay", "m" is for "Mix" and so forth. It makes sense if you're looking at the GUI which makes me think the system was designed by a programmer.

Where the rubber meets the road is the sound though, and I'm very pleased with the software's ability to take a fairly flat recording and really open it up and give it a more spacious feel. I've included a piano recording in the main body of this post, and I'll post the output of Rockster Plus Pro in the next post so that you can hear the difference.

The tune that I used for the test is the introduction to Falling Grace by Steve Swallow and I had recorded it on a Kurzweil PC88. That instrument has decent tone, and the ambiance settings are alright for live performance where the room will give you a bit of extra bounce, but for recording it's just a little flat and still so it does cry out for some decent room EQ. Rockster Plus Pro provides just that. The effects are substantial and there's enough range on the controls to provide hours of amusement.

My only gripes from a look and feel standpoint are that the help is pretty minimal, really only a single screen that primarily explains how files are named when they're saved. It would be nice if they would describe the effects in play just a bit. How much delay is there when you crank the ceiling knob all the way up? What does it represent? Not a big deal, and easily cured by opening up an audio clip and fooling around with it for a bit, but inquiring minds want to know.

It may also be an idea in a future release to embed some basic audio loops and give the user the ability to change effects "on the fly", but that may be unrealistic. There's probably some pretty CPU intensive stuff going on that may not lend itself to real time processing but I don't have a particularly fast machine and it didn't so much as hiccup during processing. I'm using a Toshiba notebook with a 2G Intel Core 2 Duo. I had the CPU usage window opened and it looked the average was 3% before hitting "Final". It then went to 22%, and spiked at 78% near the end (which happened pretty quickly on a 30 second clip.

Anyway, at the end of the day it's easy to use, and does a good job so this will certainly be part of my toolkit from now on.