Thanks for the positive feedback, Jules. Some very interesting topics you raise here.
The demos posted on our site are just that - demos. They were made according to the very personal taste of all people involved (Christian Kardeis as the composer/arranger/programmer, Martin Saleteg and Florian Walter as MIR-developers, Herb Tucmandl as The Final Vote ;-), and myself). We all agreed that we didn't want to overdo it and tried to find a convincing balance between the direct signals and the room information MIR adds to them. The funny thing is that I heard a few complaints that the pieces are too wet already, so it really boils down to individual preferences, it seems :-) ... It would have been an easy task to shift this balance, on behalf of the general Dry/Wet-Offset feature, but the mixes your hear are simply what we came up with :-) ... no additional sweetening applied!
The listening position of "Zarathustra" is the one from the 7th row, not the conductor's point-of view. Changing that is as easy as selecting another set of IRs (i.e.: another mic position) from the Select Venue-dialogue window. You wouldn't even have to re-arrange your virtual orchestra on the stage. - Another option is to move the main microphone virtually, although this feature is meant to fine-tune the perspective of your listening position in relation to the instruments on stage, and does not alter the room-information per se.
At the moment, the reverb-times you have within MIR are exactly as they appear naturally. Due to the fact that we deal with several hundreds, sometimes more than thousand of IRs for each and every stage, we have found it to be impracticable to alter the length of a room like you would expect it from simple convolution reverbs. This might change with a future version of MIR, but right now, you would either select a different hall if you aim for longer reverb (just as in Real Life ;-) ...), or add some overall reverb to the "natural" mix, like it is done more often than not with actual orchestral recordings, too.
Doing alternative mixes is a good idea, actually. Maybe I can arrange something, but please don't hold your breath for it.
... I hope this answers at least some of your questions.
The demos posted on our site are just that - demos. They were made according to the very personal taste of all people involved (Christian Kardeis as the composer/arranger/programmer, Martin Saleteg and Florian Walter as MIR-developers, Herb Tucmandl as The Final Vote ;-), and myself). We all agreed that we didn't want to overdo it and tried to find a convincing balance between the direct signals and the room information MIR adds to them. The funny thing is that I heard a few complaints that the pieces are too wet already, so it really boils down to individual preferences, it seems :-) ... It would have been an easy task to shift this balance, on behalf of the general Dry/Wet-Offset feature, but the mixes your hear are simply what we came up with :-) ... no additional sweetening applied!
The listening position of "Zarathustra" is the one from the 7th row, not the conductor's point-of view. Changing that is as easy as selecting another set of IRs (i.e.: another mic position) from the Select Venue-dialogue window. You wouldn't even have to re-arrange your virtual orchestra on the stage. - Another option is to move the main microphone virtually, although this feature is meant to fine-tune the perspective of your listening position in relation to the instruments on stage, and does not alter the room-information per se.
At the moment, the reverb-times you have within MIR are exactly as they appear naturally. Due to the fact that we deal with several hundreds, sometimes more than thousand of IRs for each and every stage, we have found it to be impracticable to alter the length of a room like you would expect it from simple convolution reverbs. This might change with a future version of MIR, but right now, you would either select a different hall if you aim for longer reverb (just as in Real Life ;-) ...), or add some overall reverb to the "natural" mix, like it is done more often than not with actual orchestral recordings, too.
Doing alternative mixes is a good idea, actually. Maybe I can arrange something, but please don't hold your breath for it.
... I hope this answers at least some of your questions.
/Dietz - Vienna Symphonic Library
