Mac-loving musicians, take note. Audio Ease has released Altiverb, a new, US$495 reverb plug-in for Digital Performer and MAS systems.
Altiverb, which takes advantage of the Velocity Engine co-processor in the G4 chip (hence, the name) is a sampled acoustics processor that offers one-, two-and four-channel sampled acoustics of real halls, churches, forests, bathrooms — and virtually any real acoustic environment. It comes with several acoustic samples, ranging from the Amsterdam Concertgebouw to bathrooms and closets.
According to the folks at Audio Ease, Altiverb even lets you sample acoustic spaces — or hardware reverbs — on your own. And they say that it’s the first reverb plug-in to take full advantage of the power of the Velocity Engine.
Altiverb offers up to 40 seconds of real-time reverb and is available in mono-to-mono, mono-to-stereo, stereo-to-stereo, mono-to-quad and stereo-to-quad effects. All processing is done in real time. Altiverb provides two operational modes: zero-latency mode and long reverb time mode.
An Altiverb preset is called an “impulse response,” which is created by firing a starter pistol or by playing a sine wave sweep from a speaker in an auditorium, church, or other acoustic space. The resulting reverberation decay is recorded as a digital audio file. Using a process called deconvolution, the dry source signal is then extracted from the audio file, leaving behind the exact acoustic fingerprint of the space.
The impulse response file is then placed in a folder, where it appears as a preset inside the Altiverb plug-in, where it can then be applied to any audio signal as real-time reverb.
Altiverb includes the Impulse Response Pre-Processor software, which allows users to sample any acoustic space, hardware reverb, or other source to create their own Altiverb presets. In addition, users can take photographs of the place they are acoustically sampling, and place JPG images in the same folder. Altiverb then displays the JPGs as a slideshow when the preset is chosen in the plug-in. Plus, these pictures can show mic positions and other details of the sampled space.
A free demo of Altiverb is available at the Audio Ease Web site. As best we can tell, the software is for the traditional Mac operating system and hasn’t been Carbonized for Mac OS X.