Acustica Plugins

Anyone used any of these?  They showed up on my Facebook page...never heard of them...

http://www.acustica-audio.com/

I've been checking out their Home Page...

The GUI's are pretty nice looking...don't know if they are any good or not though...
They have a bunch of Freebies...might have to download the try them out...

As you may already know, these are the folks behind Nebula.  A whole sub-sub-sub-culture unto itself. 
 
If you're patient enough to get into it and figure out (more or less) what it's about, it's worth the effort for the ability to run some really sweet (and relatively inexpensive) EQ, reverb, tape, and console emulators.  The best ones are developed and sold by third parties like CDSoundMaster, AlexB, Henry Olonga, Cupwise, and TimP.  CDSM's tape emus are fantastic, AlexB's consoles and EQs are very nice (I preferred his API 550a over the one from UAD), and Henry O. has a plethora of wild and insanely cheap stuff.  Just a few examples of what's available.
 
Unfortunately, the free Nebula demo isn't that impressive.  To really get it, the Nebula 3 Pro plugin is required, at which point you can download and run lots of free demos from the aforementioned vendors.  Then you have the issues of weird GUI, separate plugin instances for each EQ band, frequent heavy CPU usage, and somewhat spotty vendor support.  Still, a very interesting technology to explore in your copious amounts of spare time.
 
Cheers,
Eddie

I think Eddie has it about right.

Yeah, Eddie got it right, and deep condolances for Larry on the phantom plugin.
 
Nebula is its own creature and heavy on the CPU. Impulse file libraries deliver reverbs, flanges, cabinets maybe better than any other impulse engine, or at least up there with the best.
 
Quite a unique, remarkable system if you have the processing power to handle it and the time to invest in learning it, and the budget to buy Nebula and the add on libraries..
 
Quality program without debate. Only question in this day and age, is it worth the investments of time and money when other systems even freeware can get about the same job done.
 
John

Bajan Blue
I do think originally it was a good idea, poorly executed unfortunately and now everything else plug in wise  has improved so much, it has possibly missed its time.
Nigel

While I can agree with the impression that Nebula's success has been unfortunately diminished by a somewhat amateurish promotion/marketing/support regime, I don't agree that it has yet missed its time -- if anything, it's a technology ahead of its time.  It does require a fair bit of DAW horsepower, although this is less of an issue than it once was -- I can run a couple dozen instances on my i7 just fine using the "reverb" version of the plugin (an example of one of the counterintuitive Nebula quirks).  But as for sonic performance, there are Nebula libraries that to my ears beat any regular plugin available.  A common Nebula characteristic is the sense that you're using something better than a plugin, something closer to hardware, with smooth frequency response, a sense of depth and weight, and without the usual digital artifacts.  The idea is to "sample" a real piece of hardware using a very labor-intensive process to capture all its flavor and store that into impulse files (which can be very large).  It's much more than simple convolution, but the basic concept is similar.  Not that I'm an expert or anything.  But the results to me are almost always impressive.
 
To get an idea of what's possible, you can download some free VST plugins that use Nebula's technology from CDSoundMaster -- they run just as regular plugins, no Nebula engine required:  http://cdsoundmaster.com/site/cds-software-online/demos.html.  Be sure to check out the Neve 1084 mid-band EQ, for one.  Have fun!
 
Cheers,
Eddie

Latency is still an issue, so I doubt you could use Nebula while tracking, but for mixing it's not bad.  Your mention of reverbs reminded me of one of the stars of Nebula: the VNXT set of vintage emulations.  You can hear some audio demos here:  https://soundcloud.com/vnxtsound.  Don't miss the EMT140 examples.  It took me quite a bit of fiddling to get that plate library to work, but the result was well worth it.  It exceeds UAD's emulation, in my book.
 
Cheers,
Eddie