Sound Particles 2.1 - 3D sound design

[Guy Rowland]

I'll be demoing this soon, looks intriguing - the new version of a tool that can build crowds, swarm and doppler effects etc.



Production Expert have a good tutorial here:



The basic version is on sale for $279 until Jan 27th, then $399. A trial version is available.

https://soundparticles.com/products/sou ... /overview/

[lofi]

Please do DEMO.
Endless possibilities makes my heart skip a few beats and my mouth dry up.
Deadlines, people, deadlines don't need endless possibilities

Best,
Anders

[Guy Rowland]

Deadlines, people, deadlines don't need endless possibilities

Very much my world! That said, this is something that might well be useful for my Sound On Screen project though.

The demo looks pretty unrestrictive, just adding an audio watermark on spectral analysis and limited to 15 bits, so should be plenty of time to see if its something that will take months to master for esoteric uses, or if it can be used more practically.

[Jaap]

Oh this looks very interesting. Will try out the demo also soon and indeed a nice thing for Sound On Screen Guy!

[Thorsten Meyer]

I started to use this tool from version 1, it is a really powerful tool when it comes to moving sound in 3D space, perfect for any professional in this space.

[Guy Rowland]

Have been trailling this this morning. The main use I'd have for it is to create scale and movement from single sources (mostly sound design rather than music but you never know), so some of the features would be lost on me (eg importing from a 3D cgi file, or panning in 3D space for surround). For scale, I currently use a plugin called Crowd Chamber from QuikQuak, which does an ok rough and ready multiplication effect.

The first test was to create the sound of multiple sci-fi vehicles passing from left to right from 4 static short loops from a sound effect library:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/udwrkto2oflqg ... s.mp3?dl=0

Sounds pretty good, and it was quite quick to do using their bees preset. There are workflow issues here however, that are all related to sample prep. There appears to be no way to edit the raw samples, so if you have a 20 second file you only want to use a fraction of, then you'd have to edit it first. That goes for volume shaping too - if you wanted to have a 1 second fade in, that's something you'd need to do in an external editor. These seem bizarre omssions to me, basic top / tail fade in / out should be available either on a global or a file by file basis.

Second test - creating a crowd from small number of sources. For this I started with the Big City preset, and inputting 6 terrible 1 second rough samples of me sounding disaffected about life. The raw preset clearly had far too much pitch deviation at +/- 12 semitones, but I reduced it to 2 and it sounded surprisingly good for one-me.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/so478h0g53dy0 ... g.mp3?dl=0

If I had the luxury of half a dozen different people, I think it would sound great.

For the third test, I used the same starting point to have a massed crowd - 130 of me yelling "yes" (just what the world has been waiting for), which only took a few moments to fiddle with the settings. Similarly, created from 6 raw files of me.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/5rt7tjchsm605 ... s.mp3?dl=0

The diction here is very impressive, this is definitely better than Crowd Chamber which feels quite artifacty by comparison, and it would just be a matter of adding any appropriate Altiverb ambience.

I think this is probably good enough for me to tip me over the buying edge. Not a tool I'll reach for every day, but I do not infrequently face the problem of having to scale up and move audio and lack a good solution currently. There's always the chance I'll use it in more creative or unusual situations, it looks like a powerful tool. The limitations on basic sample top and tailing etc are annoying, but work-roundable.

[wst3]

that third example is amazing.

Thanks for sharing all of that, except now I have to talk myself out of that purchase...

[Lawrence]

Oh man-I’ve been using Crowd Chamber for a long time, and that’s infinitely better.