Effect: arkecode - VST Oversampler Pc / Open Source / Free

VST Oversampler is a VST Host that "hosts" another VST plugin and oversample it by two. That means reduced aliasing.

How to use
It's quite simple. Place the .dll into the same folder as the .dll of the VST you wish to oversample. If the plugin you want to oversample is called <plugin>.dll, then rename the oversampler .dll to <plugin>.os.dll.
How it works
Instead of writing a traditional "Host" inside of the plugin, Oversampler takes advantage of how VST works internally, and hooks itself into the dispatch callbacks of the plugins. This ensures maximum compatibility - if the plugin works with the host, and the plugin works with double the samplerate, the plugin will 99.9999999% of the time work with the Oversampler wrapper. Of course, it took me a few attempts to get it right but 1.3 has most of the kinks worked out and is working well as far as I know.
Starting with 1.3, the oversampler now uses the HIIR library by Laurent de Soras for its upsampling and downsampling, which is much better than my own which previous versions used.
Compatibility
Regular instruments and effects should all work. Offline processing plugins don't work (but who has those, anyway?). If the 64-bit processing path is used, the oversampler won't work (for most people, this doesn't apply). Older plugins that rely on accumulated processing won't. Other than that, everything should work just fine.
I've only tested this on Windows XP, but as far as I can tell, other windows versions should work fine too. No Mac or Linux - sorry.
Hosts that are confirmed to work:

  • Cubase 4.1 (there might be a caching problem, more on that when I know for sure)
  • Cubase SL3
  • Cubase SX3
  • energyXT 1.4
  • FL Studio 7
  • SaviHost
  • Tracktion 3

"The oversampler "hosts" another VST plugin, and oversamples it by 2. Because of this, aliasing has twice the frequency range to unfold, which means that the aliasing that enters back into the audible domain is much less, and upon downsampling, the upper range (containing only aliasing) is discarded. This results in audibly reduced aliasing. Here's an audio demo that demonstrates the effect of the oversampler on a simple synthesizer with naive, digital oscillators. The sequence plays twice. The first time it plays the regular synthesizer, and the second time it is played through the oversampler. You'll easily notice that audible aliasing is reduced substantially (but not completely). This is using the old oversampler, the newer ones are even better!" Via

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