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Vendor Spotlight: DDMF

Interview with Christian Siedschlag of DDMF

Q. Could you please tell us a bit about yourself and work history?

I'm originally a physicist who did his diploma and PhD studies in Germany, investigating theoretical and numerical models for atomic physics processes. I've worked at the Max-Planck-Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, the AMOLF institute in Amsterdam and, after leaving the purely academic world, the Dutch Cancer Institute, also in Amsterdam, where I've worked as a physicist in the radiotherapy department on models for radiation-tissue interaction.

I've also always been in love with music, playing various instruments (mainly guitar, but also clarinet and drums), and at some point discovered the fascinating world of digital audio recording and production. I've even considered to become a recording engineer instead of a physicist back when I had just left high school... I guess sound in general has always had a great impact on me.

Q. How did DDMF emerge?

Back in 2006, after leaving the AMOLF institute, I deliberately chose to not start another job immediately, but had a span of three or four months during the summer with some free time. Since I had been thinking about diving into VST plugin development for some time already (after all, in some sense audio effects are a marriage of physics and music), I decided to give it a go and wrote the first versions of IIEQ and LP10. They were received pretty well, although obviously the interfaces weren't as good looking as they are now, so I kept working on them even when I started a regular job again in the fall of 2006. That contract was limited to four years from the start, and when it ended, I had managed to bring DDMF to a state were it could fully provide for my income. Hence, in 2011 I started working fulltime as an audio plugin developer, further increasing the number of products and refining the existing ones.

Q. How does DDMf differentiate itself from other plugin manufacturers?

I think it's one advantage that it is still really an agile business, so I can react to new trends or feature requests very quickly and usually build them in much faster than bigger companies can. I also always try to create unique products "with a twist", like DirectionalEQ or Metaplugin, for which there are only very few competitors from the beginning. And then, I think my solid mathematical and analytical background guarantees that the whole technical/DSP side of things is really well covered. There are lots of people taking public domain algorithms and just tweaking them a bit, if at all. With DDMF, everything is manufactured from scratch, so I can go the extra mile when it comes to quality of sound.

Q. What are some of your most well known plug-ins?

The best-seller plugin is Metaplugin, for a few years already. It's really the Swiss army knife for any desktop audio producer, enabling you to create audio effect chains of almost arbitrary complexity, while it also works as a wrapper between VST, AU, RTAS and AAX plugins, as well as between older 32 bit plugins and modern 64 bit hosts. 6144 has also sold really well, it's a Neve EQ clone which, according to a lot of pros, nails the sound really well and can't be made to sound bad, no matter how extreme the settings. And DirectionalEQ, which introduced the possibility to equalize the stereo field.

Q. Can you tell us a bit about the directional EQ you developed?

Traditional stereo EQs always influence the whole stereo field: if you dial in a 6 dB gain at 500 Hz, this gain will influence the left and right channel alike. To have a bit more control, you can obviously use two separate mono EQs for the left and the right channel. One step further was the development of mid-side EQs where one mono channel can influence the center part only, and another one the side signal, which is everything that is not dead center. Directional EQ now takes this even further: for each band, you can select where in the stereo field it should operate. So it introduces an angle parameter with which the user can adjust the center position of the band anywhere between full left and full right. Which means, e.g., more treble at 2 o'clock, more base at 11 o'clock and a narrow cut to reduce a harsh hihat signal at 3 o'clock. The perfect tool to create a balanced frequency response from left to right!

Q. Why should dealers sell DDMF plug-ins?

Because they want happy customers! :-) And I think it will make customers happy when their dealer points them to a set of high quality products of which they had been unaware up to that point.

Q. How long have you been selling software digitally?

The first plugin was sold in the summer of 2006, so it's been almost 12 years now.

Q. How did you first hear about XCHANGE?

I got contacted by XCHANGE, asking me whether I'd be interested in them as a vendor to music stores worldwide.

Q. How has XCHANGE impacted your business?

I think it has definitely been helpful to have a name like XCHANGE, which dealers already know and trust, in order to get listed on major audio store sites. For instance, thomann.de is a really huge online store here in Germany, with millions of visitors per month, and of course it helps to have your products on a site like this.

Q. What are the challenges with XCHANGE, and what are your recommendations?

I think the vendor/reseller site is a bit low key, and it's not that easy to navigate and have an instant overview of your products and sales figures. I understand this is already being worked on.

Q. What features would you like to see in XCHANGE that currently do not exist?

I know it's probably hard to do, but it'd be great of XCHANGE would really be the middleman for all transactions between vendors and resellers. I.e. XCHANGE would collect all the money from the resellers, subtract their share, and send me my 70 percent on a monthly basis without me having to keep track of all sales and sending invoices to the resellers myself. This kind of service would also justify an increase from the current 5 percent to, say, 10 percent in my opinion.

Q. What's next for DDMF? Are there any upcoming product releases you can share with us?

Well, two brand new products have just been released: Plugindoctor, a standalone app for thorough technical plugin analysis, and Bridgewize, another standalone app that puts the 32-64-bit wrapping technique of Metaplugin into a separate product. So at the moment it's mainly fixing the remaining bugs that unfortunately but inevitably always seem to sneak their way into v1.0. But then, what will probably be next is an attempt to create the most universal compressing engine imaginable, which will aim to make the notoriously difficult topic of attack and release curves as transparent as possible. And, but maybe that will not happen before 2019, the plan is to build a solution for real time remote recording and collaboration. It will probably really be a bit of a nightmare from the technical perspective, with all the syncing issues etc., but it's a great challenge for sure and I don't see a comparable, DAW-independent product at the moment.