SnowTec have released Probe, available as a FREE download.
Probe measures a plug-in the way it sounds, and tells you where each measurement stops
Frequency and phase response, harmonics and aliasing kept apart, Hammerstein kernels, intermodulation, compression, impulse response, an oscilloscope, CPU load and seven correctness checks. Two chains of six slots, an A−B null test, and curves that follow the knob as you turn it.
An analyzer that draws a nice curve for any signal is hard to trust. Probe works the other way round: it measures itself first and shows where each measurement stops. When a harmonic is quieter than that, you see “below detection limit”, not an invented number.
Switched in the window header, each with its own modes in the corner of the field:
- LINEAR – magnitude and phase from a self-calibrated sweep; measured latency against reported
- HARMONICS – THD and aliasing over frequency, a 2D sweep, Hammerstein kernels 1–5 from 20 Hz
- ALIASING – a tone spectrum; every product is marked as a harmonic or a fold-back
- IMD – SMPTE against level from −40 to +6 dBFS and a spectrum with sidebands
- DYNAMICS – the static curve, threshold and slope; attack and release from a step
- IR – impulse response, the Schroeder curve, RT60 from T30 or T20, octave bands
- SCOPE – sine, square, saw and triangle in and out, plus the transfer view
- PERFORMANCE – block processing time from 16 to 2048 samples, median and p99
- CHECKS – seven correctness checks, each with a verdict and a number
Probe does not take its own word for it: an ideal device runs through the same path as the plug-in, and its result becomes the floor of the measurement.
- A self-calibrating sweep – The ideal sweep and the ideal harmonics go through the same processing as the plug-in output. Band-edge ringing and phase error are subtracted rather than drawn as a property of the plug-in.
- Detection limit – Every value has its own limit: noise, method floor, order resolution. Below it Probe writes “< −124 dB” and draws a dashed line, instead of cutting the curve or printing −600.
- Harmonics apart from aliasing – Tones sit on odd bins, so products folded back from Nyquist never mix with harmonics. On the aliasing screen every product shows its order and where it came from.
- Latency, not trusted – Probe measures latency itself, to a fraction of a sample, and compares it with what the plug-in reports to the DAW. A mismatch is shown in red: it is what shifts phase in a mix.
- Hammerstein from 20 Hz – Kernels up to the fifth order from a separate long sweep, flat from 2 Hz. A kernel more than 40 dB below the strongest, or above its order’s frequency limit, is not drawn; its limit is shown instead.
- Seven references inside – Gain, a polynomial, a hard clipper, a peak EQ, a delay, a compressor and a reverb with known answers. Put one next to a plug-in and you can see what a correct curve looks like
Left, the ARARAT 2A tube compressor against the Chaika preamp: THD solid, aliasing dashed. Right, the static curves of ARAGATS 76 and ELBRUS L, with threshold and slope written above.
Plug-ins come from the library on the left: double-click to add one to a chain, drag to place it in a slot. The list is built from plug-in descriptions, without loading a single one.
NaN and infinity on extreme signals, run-to-run repeatability, block-size independence, channel leakage, denormals on decay, memory allocation on the audio thread, state restore. Below are ARARAT 2A and Chaika; Chaika gets one note: two runs differ by −144 dB re peak.
Probe is available to PC and Mac users (VST3 and AU).
For more information on Probe, click here:
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