VST Plugin Management - Blue Cat PatchWork review

I'm an unabashed DSP plugin user, and managing plugin chains can be confusing and a pain in the ass, especially if you use more than one player. I was reading @atomicbob's profile information and noticed he was using DDMF's MetaPlugin, which is a Plugin that allows you to load and route other plugins in interesting ways. It got me thinking about how I could use something like this to simplify my own situation. I've ended up with a pretty neat way of using Blue Cat's PatchWork to manage my plugin usage.

So, first my scenario. I'm on Windows 10 using Jriver primarily and Foobar2000 as well and they are current versions. I routinely use the following plugins:

• DMG TrackControl
• DMG Equilibrium
• DMG Essence
• SonarWorks Reference 4
• SPL TwinTube
• …and now Blue Cat PatchWork

In my time I've gone back and forth between FB2K and JRMC several times and now I actually just use both. They have some idiosyncrasies around plugins that are relevant:

FB2k - only 32-bit plugins, so you are limited to VST. Generally stable, but when it does go wonky it's more problematic than JRMC. Plugin presets work well and are fairly fast to load. I map these to custom buttons to make switching easier from say speakers to headphones with different settings.

JRMC - has more features for saving presets etc., but in my experience is cripplingly slow. SonarWorks in particular slows the entire JRMC UI down (in my case) when loaded as a plugin. Basically I have avoided JRMCs own preset saving system because of shitty performance. Pluses are you can load 64-bit plugins as well as some other plugin types. I use JRMC Zones for each configuration, so one for speakers, one for each type of headphone. This works well but each Zone has a separate playlist in this case which makes switching more difficult - I can forget to switch the zone and wonder why the EQ is off sounding.

Enter Blue Cat PatchWork: https://www.bluecataudio.com/Products/Product_PatchWork/. PatchWork is a plugin which acts like a patch bay for plugins. This is the default interface - comprised of a 2d bank of cells:


There are a maximum of 8 rows and 8 columns or as few as a single cell, 1 row by 1 column. Each Cell serves as a container or bay into which another plugin can be loaded, either VST or VST3. PatchWork itself is offered in a range of plugin types, in my case I'm using the 64-bit VST.

The leftmost and rightmost columns are reserved for global plugins that operate pre and post the main parallel chains. The signal runs sequentially through the pre chain, then is fed to each parallel chain (row) simultaneously. Each chain's plugins are run in sequence, but the chains are all run together in parallel. The parallel chains are summed or averaged (your choice) before being submitted to post processing. You can also Solo the parallel chains, either exclusively or in groups. Two columns gives you pre and post only, and three or more introduces up to parallel chain cells. The row count makes cells available in the sequential pre and post chains as well, so you may well have 'empty' parallel chains if you have more pre or post plugins.

Interestingly, because PatchWork is a VST, you can load PatchWork into PatchWork bays and build extremely complex structures - though I would imagine MetaPlugin does this better visually as it renders the UI as a sort of mind map so you can see complex relationships better.

In my case, this is the layout:

• I have a common -8dB Pad in Pre, to provide a common overhead for DSP. I'll return to this.
• I have one parallel chain for each scenario - in my case transducer - that I will be using
• I have the Soloing function set for exclusive Solo. You'll notice the lit up green S symbol in the first chain which indicates that chain is soloed. In exclusive mode soloing another chain will deactivate any others so only that chain is active. This way I get to switch easily between these like presets.
• The reason for the -8db Pad in Pre versus doing that for each chain (and certainly each chain could need different minimum headroom) is because when switching Chains the gain jumps back up to zero while the new chain is initialized. I find this annoying enough to take this approach.
• The control at the bottom of the screen is mapped to the Sensitivity control in the instance of Essence in the first chain. You can map up to 8(?) custom controls to any parameter exposed by any plugin.
• The UI of the Plugin is shown when activated by the little Screen button on the top right of the plugin bay.
• Each Chain can be activated or deactivated, Soloed, Gain Adjusted pre and post and Phase reversed independently.
• Each Cell can be activated or deactivated.

This setup lets me quickly switch DSP settings and provides a lot of ways to configure the software. Most of all, this all loads as a single JRiver plugin and is WAY faster in terms of managing presets. And on top of that I can load the same PatchWork configuration into Foobar2000 or any other player/DAW and reuse it. In the case of Foobar2000 it's even smart enough to load the 32-bit plugins and politely disables the SPL TwinTube plugin as that one is 64-bit only. Pretty neat!

As you can imagine, if you wanted to have various different configurations for each transducer you could simply have a single column and load an instance of PatchWork itself into each bay so you had this entire environment available again.
Or experiment with running a single chain in parallel to see how that sounds…and on and on. You could go nuts.

A few more points:

• PatchWork has a whole set of built-in DSP capabilities that can be added in to any bay: Delay and Reverb, Dynamics, EQ and Filters, Effects, Modulation and Utilities that can be added into any bay.
• PatchWork can also be added as a MIDI instrument, for those doing actual creation, and in fact has a Standalone mode where it can run outside of a Host entirely for such purposes. I have also found this very useful for just playing around with configurations, as you can drag and drop across multiple instances of PatchWork running standalone. The presets save to the same place, so you can set up the config outside the Player and then simply Load it in your Player instance to enable it.

Sonically I don't hear any difference running the chain through PatchWork as opposed to directly in JRiver. As a management tool for plugins, it's way faster and more fully-featured than the 'native' players and can be shared across environments. I have no regrets forking out the dough for this one.

Highly recommended.

 

That looks to be a very useful plugin. Will add that to my lab tools. Blue Cat has some other rather useful items, especially in metering and audio analysis visualization.

 

Thanks for this write up @GoodEnoughGear. I use habitually use Roon these days, but the big drawback for me is no plug-ins. Luckily its built in DSP is good enough, if minimal, most of the time but I boy do miss DMG Equilibrium...