Please welcome Matt Glenn to the channel for this review.
When it comes to Spatial Audio, Matt Glenn of Ears Up Sound Design is my expert. Sound Particles offered me their new Space Controller plugin to review and I instantly sent it to Matt.
Space Controller is a surround panning plugin with a companion app to use a phone’s gyroscope sensors to control X Y and Z position of a sound source. The result is an intuitive way to pan point-source audio by literally pointing your phone in any direction.
https://soundparticles.com/products/spacecontroller
About Space Controller
“Space Controller is the best way to pan sounds in surround and immersive. Simply connect your mobile device to a DAW, use it as a movement reader and pan the sounds to where you’re pointing. “
“Panning with knobs in stereo is perfectly fine. However, when working with surround or 3D sound, even when using joysticks, it’s much harder to get the results we’re looking for. Space Controller is a plugin and an app, that together allow you to pan sound from stereo to any immersive format, either in a home studio or mixing stage. “
Disclaimer: Sound Particles provided this software at no cost for this review.
00:00 – Intro
01:07 – Space Controller Plugin Interface
07:55 – Mobile Phone Control
10:29 – Binaural Motion control demonstration
13:09 – The Good Stuff
14:12 – Needs improvement
The Good Stuff:
- Ease of setup (mobile device calibration works immediately)
- Flexibility of having different styles of panning, many input formats, etc.
- GUI is intuitive, easy to look at
- Binaural algorithm actually sounds pretty good
Things I’d like to see improved:
- Lack of custom speaker layouts — this is the big one for me, even if it’s not as much of a big deal for most users. Sound Particles, itself, has the ability to customize this so it would be really nice to see a “Custom” option in the outputs section.
- The roll-the-dice feature does not allow you to constrain the parameters that get randomized, making it a bit brute-force for most situations. For instance, in mono or channel mode it randomizes X, Y, and Z parameters, which might not be desirable for users who aren’t using the Z axis.
Huge thanks to Sound Particles for offering this really cool software, and thanks to Matt for making this excellent tutorial and review.
I recently interviewed Matt on the subject of Spatial Audio, and ReaSurroundPan plugin.