Duck Buddy 2 by Slynk

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmZxriYwupg

Duck Buddy 2 is a MaxForLive device designed to make sidechain compression ridiculously accurate, flexible and easy. Customize your gain reduction shape, add ring modulation sidechain from an audio source and scale your gain reduction with MIDI velocity. Copy and paste your gain reduction shape from one Duck Buddy to another. Smoothly fade the volume down with lookahead to avoid clicks. It's easy.

Why use Duck Buddy 2?
VST sidechain compression plugins like Volume Shaper and LFOTool all have the same workflow problem. You can't pick a MIDI channel directly on the VST, you have to route MIDI to it. That means, every time you add another Volume Shaper, you need to set up another external instrument in your Drum Rack to send MIDI to it. Ain't nobody got time for that! With Duck Buddy 2, select your inputs once and then copy/paste it anywhere in your project that you want to sidechain. No additional setup is needed.

Thanks for checking it out. I hope you enjoy it!
- Slynk

FAQ

Q: Make Duck Buddy 2 multiband please?
A: Create your own frequency split rack in Ableton and put a Duck Buddy 2 on each band. Tada! Now you have a multiband Duck Buddy 2. I'd recommend using EQ3s to make the freqsplit rack but if you are interested in adding 64ms of unnecessary latency to your project, free free to use Pro Q3s in linear phase mode to create a split rack LOL!

Q: Can I use this in FL Studio or some other DAW? / Can you make a VST version?
A: No. The VST framework doesn't provide what dB2 needs to work so it's impossible to make a VST version that works on any other DAW.

Q: Does this work with Ableton Live Standard/Intro?
A: No. You need MaxForLive (which only comes with Ableton Live Suite) for this to work.

Q: Can you make a version that works in Ableton Live 9 or 10?
A: No. Ableton Live versions 10 and below are packaged with an older version of MaxForLive which doesn't have all the features dB2 requires.

Q: If I use a "/" at the beginning of my channel names, Duck Buddy 2 will still work without any problems right?
A: No, it breaks everything. Don't do that. Why would you do that?

Q: I've got a project with so many channels/chains that when I open the routing menu, I can't see all of the channels because the popup window goes off the screen. What can I do?
A: Send me a maxforlive device with routing menus that you can scroll around in, and I'll copy those menus into DB2. Spoiler alert: such a device doesn't exist and propagating routing menus is ridiculously complex. Have less channels in your project, or change your Live zoom setting until you can see all the options LOL.

Q: I found a bug / I have an idea for a feature! How can I tell you about it?
A: Join my Discord server and hit me up in the #maxforlive or #bug-reports channels with as much detail as possible. I'll get back to you as soon as I can.

Q: Duck Buddy 2 forgot my inputs! I found a bug!
A: Congratulations, you've found the same bug I've been dealing with for the last 15 years or so. I call it The Rack Bug.

The Rack Bug
When DB2 is inside a rack and you copy/paste (CMD+C/CMD+V) the rack, the DB2 in the newly pasted rack will have forgotten the MIDI and Audio inputs you selected. I'm pretty sure I can't fix this behaviour from my end. Why? You can observe the same bug with the stock Ableton Compressor. When it's inside a rack and you copy/paste the rack, the compressor forgets the sidechain channel you had selected. So it seems to be a bug with racks themselves.

The Rack Bug Workaround
Don't copy/paste racks. Instead duplicate the rack with CMD+D. Or you can hold CMD and drag & drop the rack to duplicate it. Duplicating the rack allows DB2 and the stock Ableton compressor to remember the inputs, for whatever reason LOL.

Change Log

July 19, 2025 - V2.05

• The shaded lookahead area now resizes when zooming in snapshot mode. Nice.
• I made a small change to the Push support. I don't have a Push so I can't confirm that this fixes anything. I'm also not sure there was a problem to begin with, but a couple users reported errors.
• The shape nodes are sometimes hard to click but increasing their size doesn't actually increase their hitbox so I decided to make the nodes smaller so that you're forced to be more accurate with your clicks. This should hopefully reduce misclicks.
• RM input doesn't work correctly until Duck Buddy 2 gets at least one MIDI note because MIDI notes are tied to the depth control. To fix this, DB2 internally "receives" one MIDI note when the device loads, internally setting the depth to the default of -infdB.
• Live 12.2 changed the way maxforlive scopes handle multichannel audio signals causing a visual bug where you are only seeing the bottom half of the waveforms. To fix this, I'm manually summing and scaling the stereo signal before it hits the scopes. This change is backwards compatible to Live 11.
• Previously, setting the Depth slider roughly to the halfway point was labelled -33dB (linear) but internally the depth was more like -6dB (exponential) which is the intended behaviour as -6dB is considered "half" the volume as 0dB. I've changed the Depth slider label from a linear to an exponential scale which is more accurately displaying what is actually happening.
• Now, when loading DB2 for the first time, the default scope view is RM Input in Snapshot mode, and Lookahead is defaulted to 5ms. After using DB2 myself for the past 6 months, I found these defaults to be much more useful. If you don't like it, just save a preset and load that.
• Btw, I know I skipped V2.04 and went straight to V2.05 which might not make any sense, but it makes sense to me, which is all that really matters LOL.

Jan 12, 2025 - V2.03:

• Added Push support.
• The lookahead length in samples was sometimes calculated as a fraction which was then being truncated, leading to it being 1 sample too short and causing clicks at 44.1khz sample rate. I fixed this by rounding instead of truncating.
• You can now macro Lookahead, Length & Time Mode controls in a rack.
• The Smooth control's range (0–100) only had 100 possible steps. Corrected to 101 to include 0.

Nov 26, 2024 - V2.02:

• Editing the shape by clicking the shape with your mouse triggers DB2 to remember the shape. But using the paste and clear buttons wasn't. This means your shape will be forgotten the next time you load the project. I fixed this by adding an additional step to the paste and clear buttons so that they also update the shape memory.

Nov 25, 2024 - V2.01:

• The lookahead fade begins at 0 dB and goes down to -inf dB. So if you trigger a new gain reduction shape before the previous one has finished, you can get a nasty click because the gain is instantly jumping up to 0 dB to begin the lookahead fade. I fixed this by starting the lookahead fade from the last known gain reduction level.
• In velocity mode and at RM amounts higher than 100%, the RM gain reduction was able to push down past the GR shape. I fixed this by clipping the bottom of the RM signal at the depth of the GR shape. Also, RM smoothing was not being scaled correctly in velocity mode. I fixed that too.

Nov 22, 2024 - V2.00:

• Duck Buddy 2 released! Yay!
  

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