SPAT 2 announced

[Luciano Storti]

Looks like it's taking a more "familiar" approach to the interface design. Reminiscent of Virtual SoundStage 2, though undoubtedly should sound better. Really looking forward to this (!) and hopefully to an implementation of multiple sources that doesn't require surround setup in the DAW.

https://www.facebook.com/FluxSound/phot ... =3&theater

[givemenoughrope]

Brain just exploded...
I wasn't that pumped for AES this year (I don't know why) but now I am.

I'm also wondering if it's time to bump up to Nuendus from Cubeass to take full advantage of the number of input channels. I wish I could host this on my slaves too.

[Jack Weaver]

Do they give any reason why it should sound better?

.

[Luciano Storti]

Apologies Jack, what I meant is that it should undoubtedly sound better than VSS2, which I like, but once used on multiple sources, starts coloring the sound negatively. Flux hasn't said anything about the sound of SPAT2. Based on the original SPAT, I'm just making the assumption that it will sound as good (and therefore better than VSS2).

[Suganthan]

better than VSS2

From what I understand from demoing, VSS2 use clever tricks(filtering, delaying, mixing between delay lines) to create the stage illusion which is a reason for their less cpu usage. It never actually emulates the stage itself. I'd say how. Lets say I'm are feeding a dry library's stereo signal into VSS2. I now have no problem staging the instrument, you can move, rotate, control, etc. which can give you somewhat realistic results. Now, if I just feed only the Left signal of my stereo signal into VSS 2 (now you might began to wonder), the output of VSS 2 is also Left only. Let me try to move the instrument over the stage and lets see the output changes, but no, whatever I do, rotate, control, etc. No output on the other right channel.

So what does this mean? I'm no expert, but I think, the signal goes into VSS 2, gets faux staging rather real staging.

[Piet De Ridder]

It’s earlier than early days of course, but I have to confess that a part of me is getting a little bit worried looking at that interface.

As far as I’m concerned, the only thing that stands in the way of the current SPAT being the Undisputed Ruler Of (Virtual) Space, is the fact that in most DAW’s, it is very difficult, neigh impossible, to make use of SPAT’s 16 inputs. Even if the reason for this may be more a limitation in the DAW’s themselves rather than in SPAT, it is something for which I had always hoped Flux:: would find a work-around.
And the thing is, they have. But they don’t use it. It’s called SampleGrabber, a plugin they developed for their PureAnalyzer system and which, in my (granted, technically uninformed) view, could also work perfectly with SPAT. SampleGrabber is a simple plugin that ‘grabs’ audio from your DAW (from any track, bus or output where you insert it) and sends it to the Analyzer. Now, imagine if SampleGrabber could work with SPAT in the same way: run SPAT as an external application alongside your DAW, feed it up to 16 channels of ‘grabbed audio’, spatialize these channels in SPAT, and send SPAT’s output back to the DAW. Et voilà, as the French say, problème résolu. (And there's even the added benefit of SPAT not taking up resources inside your DAW.)

That is what I hoped SPAT v3 (the latest update) would have brought, but it didn't. But who knows, maybe they’ve implemented this (or something similar) in SPAT 2.

_

[Luciano Storti]

It seems to me, from my limited information based on the one screenshot, that they may have gone the route of VSS2 in regards to the way inputs are handled. Meaning you add the plugin on each channel you want to be able to affect. I have not tried Sample Grabber, and as such can't comment on it, but the way you describe, Piet, seems marginally more laborious to me than instantly opening a bunch of instances of SPAT2 on several Logic channel strips without routing to an external "master."

Personally, I think that having "coupled" instances, where each instance can display all the instruments loaded, just like in VSS2, is a great way to go for organization and hard to beat. Not to mention easy and quick. And with 64bit, I'm not terribly worried about SPAT residing inside the DAW.

But, and this one is actually a deal breaker: I am sincerely hoping SPAT2 retains most if not all of the deep functionality and flexibility of the current version. As I spend more time with it and employ it ever more often, it is becoming the one piece of software I can almost not do without. It instantly gives depth to my mixes, in a very transparent and convenient way.

[Piet De Ridder]

Coupled ‘satellite’ instances would be fine with me as well, provided the actual mixing of all those signals happens in one single instance of SPAT, as opposed to every track having its own instance.
Because, ideally, the presence of various sources in a single instance of SPAT would influence both the individual and total spatialization (like it does in a real room). Meaning that there would be a noticeable difference between, on the one hand, the spatialization of, say, a trumpet all on its own and, on the other, that same trumpet in that same room but surrounded by 8 or 10 other instruments.
For one thing, it would avoid the stacking of individual spatializations in a mix — which is what happens when you give each source its own instance of SPAT.

_

[Guy Rowland]

If the above could happen, if it were possible to run everything through a single instance somehow and have it treat everything separately but influentially, that would be veeeeery interesting. Maybe I'm misunderstanding though - that would mean an awful lot of ins and outs somehow?

[Piet De Ridder]

Lots of ins, yes, but just a single stereo out. No? For stereo mixes that is. And 'surround out' for surround mixes, etc. ...

_

[Guy Rowland]

Lots of ins, yes, but just a single stereo out. No? For stereo mixes that is. And 'surround out' for surround mixes, etc. ...

_

Talk me through the theoretical routing. I have a channel in my daw for, say, oboe. I can EQ and ride the volume. This would then get sent post-fader ONLY to SPAT - so not an insert, and not routed to any group? Then everything just returned onto the master bus? That's not terribly appealing, I can see it being a pain for mixing. Also if I ever upgrade from my lazy-ass ER and Tail methodology, I'd want separate spatial returns for each main group for stems purposes, even if they're all set the same.

Of course you could have, say, 5 instances for at least the main groups, then at least (if you mix that way) you can get an overall balance of your groups and your stems will be neat and tidy.

A colleague of mine in Post said years ago that someone needs to make a reverb with multiple ins and outs, but only one set of controls, for stems purposes. If you are putting dialogue and sound effects and music from a stereo into the same virtual space, you don't want them all coming out the same output. But its very handy to be able to tweak the actual space globally. Not quite the same as our discussion here, but there is a bit of an overlap.

[tack]

I wonder if it will be cheaper.

[Piet De Ridder]

(...) Talk me through the theoretical routing. I have a channel in my daw for, say, oboe. I can EQ and ride the volume. This would then get sent post-fader ONLY to SPAT - so not an insert, and not routed to any group? Then everything just returned onto the master bus? That's not terribly appealing, I can see it being a pain for mixing. (...)

For a traditional reverb unit, I’d obviously agree, Guy, but the thing with SPAT is that it is not a traditional reverb unit, it is in fact a virtual room. (The difference between the two can’t be stressed enough.)
In order for SPAT to be 100% SPAT (the way it was designed), it *has* to be used as an insert. Placing sources somewhere inside a virtual room of your own design — that is, simply put, what working with SPAT is all about.
You don't send a certain amount of a source to SPAT and then mix SPAT's return with the source, no, you put sources inside SPAT, and the outcome is what you work with from then on: the source as it would sound if played back in the room you chose for your music to be heard in.

(Using SPAT as a send-to device is always a possibility in DAW’s of course, but it really makes no sense at all to work that way, in that it completely ignores the very essence of what makes SPAT so different from traditional reverbs.)

With traditional reverb, reverb gets added to a source. And at all times during the mix, you have full control over the balance between the naked source and the reverberation.
Not so with SPAT. SPAT, being the virtual room which it is, simulates the complex phenomenon of what happens when a sound is generated somewhere inside a room. That’s an entirely different concept from ‘adding the desired amount of reverb to a source sound’.
SPAT doesn’t add, it generates a new (virtual) reality: that of the source signal sounding inside a room of your choosing - and SPAT gives you a simulation of what that sounds like.

There is, for example, no dry/wet slider in SPAT. Because that is, again, not how SPAT works. A sound enters SPAT, like it would enter a real room, and from that moment it is always 100% wet, again just like in a real room. However, 100% wet in this case, doesn’t mean that you’ll only hear 100% of the room and 0% of the source, no, it means that, as soon as you enter SPAT, you hear 100% of (the simulation of) the interaction between the source and the room’s response to that source.

(The whole thing can, to some degree, be compared to re-amping tracks in a room.)

All of which goes some way to explaining, I hope, why a single stereo out (in the case of a stereo mix), is all that SPAT has to provide.

_

[Guy Rowland]

Actually Piet it doesn't really explain it. It explains how I understand SPAT works now, but not how it could handle multiple inputs simultaneously. Everything you write sounds just fine to me all the while you have an instance per instrument, and you just control the balances on the SPAT stereo outs or probably better the inputs (as I guess the room excites differently at different volumes?). I can't fathom how it would not be unwieldy if ALL the inputs share one output though, hence my routing question. Of course you can ride the levels going into it, but if they all come out the same two outputs it creates the two problems I mentioned in the previous post - 1) an inability to group mix and 2) an inability to print multiple stems. And of course if you use the one-instance-per-instrument method, you need 800 thirsty instances for an 800 instance template.

[Piet De Ridder]

I can see how that would be a problem, yes, but only because you described a mixing situation for which, I think, SPAT wasn’t designed and for which SPAT isn’t the right tool either.

Firstly, I don’t use (and don’t recommend the use of) SPAT for anything that already has ambience as part of its samples. If I’m doing, say, a 50 track mock-orchestral mix, at least 30-40 of those tracks won’t need SPAT. Anything from Orchestral Tools, Spitfire, EastWest, Cinesamples, ProjectSAM, etc …: SPAT doesn’t go near those.

Which would leave 10-20 tracks that I intend to process with SPAT. Now, this being a mix where the space is already defined by the bulk of my orchestral tracks, all that I expect from SPAT in this case, is to simply generate a compatible space (compatible with the space of my ambient libraries) around the instruments which need it (which would be anything from VSL, XSample, SampleModeling, etc …) And that is again fundamentally different from having SPAT be the virtual room where your entire mix lives in.

So, in this situation, I simply load one or several instances of SPAT, and send those dry instruments through it, some individually others by section, depending on what the situation requires. Printing stems is going to be something of a hassle, involving lots of muting and/or soloing, but doable. Even more doable if your computer is powerful enough to give each of those instruments (or sections) its own instance of SPAT.
But again: using SPAT like this may be very satisfying — at least, I think it is — but it is not the sort of usage that SPAT was designed for, and it certainly isn’t the way that reveals the full miracle that SPAT is capable of.

SPAT, in my mind, is at its best — its entire arsenal of powers fully exploited — if you’re doing a mix of, say, a small jazz band, or a piece of chamber music, or a folk group, or maybe an a cappella quartet, or a group of actors recording a theatre play, or post-production dubbing … In short: anything that has a smallish, manageable amount of tracks (up to 16 or so), all of them dry, and all needing to happen in the same room (even moving around in that room if so required, as it might be the case for the theatre play recording or the dubbing).

In mixes like these, SPAT would be the penultimate stage in the mixing chain, only followed by end-of-the-line dynamic processing, or maybe some finalizer contraption or other: (1) prepare the mix pre-SPAT (no need for panning though, or depth-suggestion via EQ, etc… as all those things are handled inside SPAT), (2) send the lot into SPAT and, finally (3) apply, if needed, some dynamic finalizing.

[Guy Rowland]

Yes, that clarifies a little, and I guess its pretty logical that it couldn't handle even semi-ambient libraries like LASS or HS, but it's shame as those need almost as much care and attention to blend. But all my reservations still stand, as you say it's a lot of muting and fuss to print. It was kind of what I was hoping things might be different in SPAT 2 from the earlier comments, but sounds like not?

[Piet De Ridder]

Yes, that clarifies a little, and I guess its pretty logical that it couldn't handle even semi-ambient libraries like LASS or HS, but it's shame as those need almost as much care and attention to blend.

Actiually, LASS, being not drenched in recorded room, works quite well with SPAT. One of those demo videos I made some time ago, in fact uses LASS as an example: http://thesoundboard.net/resources/SB_S ... zation.mp4 (The full explanation of what is being demonstrated here can be read here, under 'dynamic spatialization').
But, personally, I wouldn't go much wetter than LASS when picking sources that need to be spatted. HS might still work, just (never tried it), but that's definitely where I would draw the line.

_

[FriFlo]

Wouldn't it be cool, if you could set up a FX-channel in VEpro with 16 inputs being routed to it on seperate channels? You could create your (e.g.) sample modeling brass section with spat by just assigning these to spat and then receive a single stereo channel from that spat instance. I suppose this could easily be done, as it works that way with MIR. But VEpro 6 this is still not possible, as I am aware of. I suggest VEpro, as almost everyone is using it anyway instead of hosting in the DAW and this would make it work for every DAW.

[Piet De Ridder]

Never being floored by what I heard it do, I also never really looked into the details of MIR, as to how it works and integrates in a mix. But from what I understand, MIR is also a virtual room, like SPAT, only, in MIR the room and the source's placement in it are defined and rendered by way of convolution, as opposed to SPAT where all that is done algorithmically, right?

So — a few ignorant questions, if I may — how are the problems as described by Guy, addressed in MIR? Say you have 80-track virtual orchestra, all VSL and all spatialized in MIR, and you need to print stems, how does that work? Also one-by-one requiring lots of muting and/or soloïng, or does MIR have some extra functionality up its sleeve that makes the process much more streamlined?
And if you send something into MIR (in VEPro), at which output does the spatialized signal appear? Does MIR have its own outputs (and how many?), alongside the dry source tracks, or is the spatialized signal send back to the track where the source comes from? Or something else?

_

[FriFlo]

Well, I am not profoundly fond of MIR myself, neither was it the intention of my post to speak for it. It is much more VEpro that makes a lot of things work great, especially with VST3 or, eventually, AU version 2.
I can only tell you, MIR works exactly the way you would like SPAT to work. It is a standalone application and you can route all audio via plugin on each instrument channel in your DAW or VEpro to it. You have the option to output the spatialized sound separately for each plugin or on one channel. VEpro also enables you to route audio to and from your DAW. So, my intention was to say, Spat could be made to work as you intend with VEpro, if only multiple channels of audio could be routed to one plugin instance. I would like to see that as well, as Spat is really cumbersome regarding getting the audio in.

[Piet De Ridder]

Thanks, Fri!

What puzzles me is this: "You have the option to output the spatialized sound separately for each plugin." Surely that can only be done if there's a dedicated instance of MIR per source track? Otherwise, you'd be dealing with certain amounts of bleed from the other tracks' spatializations, no? Unless ... MIR is so powerful and clever that it is able, all within one instance of the software, to isolate each of the incoming source tracks (and their spatialization) and send them out completely separated from everything else as well.

_

[wst3]

MIR is so powerful and clever that it is able, all within one instance of the software, to isolate each of the incoming source tracks (and their spatialization) and send them out completely separated from everything else as well. _

Speaking as a recovered software engineer I'm not sure what you describe is all that magical. I can envision a DSP routine where individual inputs remain isolated during processing, and then fed out. What would be magical - but again I think quite possible - would be the ability to include some of the bleed/crosstalk.

For reference, the first drum/percussion library I owned that included a mixer was DFH Superior. They have some great samples, and I love that left and right hand can be controlled separately. But the thing that floored me, and the reason I continue to use it almost exclusively for production work, is the bleed. The difference it can make is astonishing.

I'll set up a kit with a stereo pair for overheads, and then enable only the snare (top) and kick microphone channels, and play with the bleed controls to get a mix that sounds an awful lot like it was done in the real world. It's a lot of work, not every project needs that level of detail, but it is cool, and sounds great. (caveat - I started out with 8 tape tracks and probably nine microphones, so two microphones on each drum in a kit wasn't even a fantasy. That has, I'm certain, affected my tastes.)

So if MIR or SPAT or EAReverb or some tool could manage placement in the sound space AND add some bleed that would be pretty darned cool in my book!

[FriFlo]

Let has not focus on how MIR works in the inside. I can only see, how it can be used, but that is not my point. That is rather VEpro, which could be used for any DAW to route channels back to Cubase or Logic, hosting instruments and FX. If only VEpro could handle VST3 plugins with multiple inputs, the problem for SPAT could be solved. I am merely suggesting VEpro, because I don't expect Cubase to offer it soon, as that would compete with their own Nuendo, which offers more multichannel options for a price. I am not sure wether that would concern Logic.
Anyway, I would love to be able to route multiple channels of audio to one SPAT instance! :-) I guess we can all agree on that.

[givemenoughrope]

OK! So, I had about 10 minutes at the AES Flux booth yesterday. I'm not sure how much I should reveal (not sure of the protocol on these things) or even if I could relay everything I saw (some of it went clear over my head, mostly the various surround formats/encoders) but let's just say that basically everything that requires a compromise or workaround with SPAT is no longer going to be an issue. No more DAW routing limitations as they are using a rewire-type setup akin to the audio input feature in VEpro or as Piet mentioned with Samplegrabber. Also, they've changed the way sound sources can be modified from one source at a time to multiple sources (huge help and time-saver); for instance, moving them around the virtual space in relation to each other or changing any of the features of multiple sources like yaw, azimuth, elevation, etc. CPU hit wasn't bad before but is promised to be more efficient (he made the point of saying that SPAT isn't just a plugin now but also meant for live sound). There are no longer three reverbs in tandem, now only one (forget the reason for this). They promised more frequent updates as well. Future features include the ability to use plugins on each sound source and incorporating impulse responses into the reverb section. (I guess I just spilled the beans. Whatever.)

Also, I suggested that they do tutorials (as the only way I've figured out anything is either via Piet's videos or just trial and error) and they assured me there would be plenty.

Piet posted something ages ago about SPAT just being a tool for audio and not something tailored for the VI/Sample users ala MIR, VSS, or even record producers like Altiverb, etc. I relayed to the rep how I'm starting to use SPAT with my electric guitarviol (recorded direct, into one mono instance based on the 'Small Toilet' preset and then send to another stereo instance like 'Small Hall' or something. Dude was like, "You could do that." I explained how valuable SPAT was for sample library users attempting to get samples recorded dry to jive with wet sounds. "Ok." Wasn't concerned. And I think that's a good thing. It's just a tool for audio. If it became one that promised your samples to sound like they were placed in Air L or Eastwood or whatever then I'm not sure how useful this tool would be apart from achieving those things. And I think that is overall the ethos (or lack thereof) of Flux. That said, I can see the VI/sample world getting into this software and hopefully that ensures that they stay afloat for a long time...since i don't see any other replacements for this software...especially with SPAT 2.

SPAT 2. I am excite.

[tack]

Thanks for the update. Looking forward to demoing it.