Soundly releases Place it, a freeware convolution plugin that simulates the audio characteristics of different playback devices and rooms.
Creative effects are plentiful in the plugin space. There are shockingly few which try to emulate the particular characteristics of certain devices, like television, and how we might perceive them.
Thankfully, the good folks at Soundly have released Place it, a free plugin meant to embody these very attributes.
Place It has a deceptively simple interface when you first instantiate it. The core interface consists of a pair of rotary knobs, two power buttons, and a slider. There’s actually a fair amount of creative potential with this handful of interface elements, however.
The first rotary knob is labeled Speaker and has a series of impulse responses meant to capture the sound of a particular speaker. There are ten impulse responses in total, which range from portable devices like earbuds and smartphones all the way up to huge devices like announcement speakers or megaphones.
You can also just turn the speaker IR off, and get the spatial processing from the Space option.
Space has a wider variety of IRs, which are meant to capture a variety of real spaces. There are options like caverns, living rooms, classrooms, and stairwells.
Just like the Speaker option, these can be disabled if you’d rather just have the character of the speaker without placing it within a particular space. These act as reverbs, so you can also just adjust the timing of the reverb itself if you so choose when selecting a particular space.
The final control of note is the Wall, which acts as a filter of sorts. This is meant to emulate how you might perceive a sound through a wall and suitably muffles and dampens the sound as you might expect.
Place it allows for a great deal of creativity, and it works exceptionally well as a sound design tool. It is also a useful tool for the mixing stage.
The knobs make the effect of an IR more pronounced at higher values, so you can make rave music in a simulated cave if you so choose.
Place it is available for Windows and Mac computers. Supported plugin formats are VST3, AU, and AAX. Native support for Apple Silicon is provided.
Download: Place it
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8 Comments
Tomislav Zlatic
onA big THANK YOU to BPB reader Christian H. for the info about Soundly Place it.
Dita
onThank you
Carlos
onNice
mx
onthis plugin is brilliant!
L
onVery cool and useful! Only negative thing I can find is the interface not being resizable.
Bruno de Souza Lino
onIf you’re using Cakewalk, be aware this plugin crashes it without any error message.
Darren Lowen
onIf you’re a Windows user, be careful of Place It’s download button. If you click on the word Download, it will download the Mac installer. You have to move your mouse to the right and click the Windows flag. Just sayin’.
Bill
onThis plugin crashed Studio One Pro 5.5 several times. Not happy.