Mid/Side processing in OB - what's it actually doing?

Since there’s no true documentation available for this feature, I figured I’d solicit thoughts here. What I’m wondering is what the Mid/Side mode in Overbridge is actually useful for. From what I can tell, the different options available are doing the following:

L/R - separates the incoming stereo signal into Left and Right, processes them the same (except for Freq Pan) then sends the signal out.

Mid/Side - separates the incoming stereo signal into mid and side, processes them the same (except for Freq Pan) then sends the signal out.

Mid - same as Mid/Side, but sides are removed from the Wet mix.

Side - same as Mid/Side, but mid is removed from the Wet mix.

So the Mid/Side mode is really only useful if you want the same effect algorithms with the same settings to process the mids separately from the sides, correct? Also, does anyone else notice weird phasing issues when using M/S mode?

What? They added M/S to the overbridge plugin? Fascinating, thanks for the tip. Will look into it, heating only the sides or the mid can come in handy for sure!

Mid/Side mode could be used with the freqpan control, this way you could offset the filter cutoff for the mid and sides. As for the other controls, might not be super useful as they do the same thing for both channel streams…

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it would be great to add mid/side into device also. I’m not using OB everytime.

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Absolutely this!

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Yep, another +1 for allowing this to work outside OB, which I don’t use at all.

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So unless I’m missing something, I can’t use different settings for mid and side simultaneously? Unless I want one to be completely dry and one to be processed? Seems it would be much more useful this way…

I can’t figure this one out - anyone got any tips? The sound can get very mono when playing with the Freq. Pan control which surely isn’t right… :thinking:

According to the explanation above, it gets very mono because it is actually mono. One channel is the mono sum of l and r. The other is a mono mix of the difference between l and r. To do stereo MS the Heat would need at least 3 channels. If you had a lot of wide panning in your track or a lot of stereo effects then this Ms trick might not work too well.

Am I right in thinking if I record with the M/S Mode set to Mid it will give me a mono audio track?