IRCAM, a French institute dedicated to the research of music and sound, continues to push the boundaries of sound design with its latest offering, ASAP (AudioSculpt As Plugins).
This cutting-edge DSP plugin suite boasts various innovative features, including two exciting freebies for plugin enthusiasts to explore. These freebies serve as a glimpse into the creativity and inspiration that the rest of the ASAP suite has to offer, solidifying IRCAM’s reputation as an institute that prioritizes pushing the envelope in audio technology.
First up is Spectral Remix, a plugin that allows for rebalancing and adjustment of harmonics, noise, and attack of a sound. The interface for Spectral Remix is easy to read and doesn’t leave much to the imagination.
There is a certain simplicity to the design of Spectral Remix, which leads to it being immediately intuitive to grasp and utilize. It does excellent work on drum loops and can go into full chaos to mangle typical sounds in a very unusual way. It is heavily reminiscent of the Focusrite Smart Balancer, but with less of the AI trickery and more FFT magic behind the scenes.
Spectral Clipping rounds out the duo of freebies, and it works as you would think. It lacks the granularity of control of something like Newfangled Audio’s Saturate, but it excels in bringing out and clipping elements.
The knobs on Spectral Clipping are rather deceiving if you’re more accustomed to typical mixing processors. Low and high don’t correspond with frequency bands, but rather low energy and high energy information. This can reduce background noise, increase ambient room tone, or whatever else you can imagine.
The two ASAP freebies deviate from the norm of traditional mixing processors and instead prioritize creativity and inspiration. With an atypical approach to sound manipulation, the ASAP plugin suite aims to evoke a new level of creativity in audio production and sound design.
The rest of the AudioSculpt As Plugins suite is paid, with the freebies acting as tasters for the rest of the creative effects suite.
IRCAM provides ASAP for Windows and Mac users. Windows computers can leverage VST, VST3, and AAX. Mac users can expect to use VST, VST3, AU, and AAX.
Download: ASAP (AudioSculpt As Plugins)
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10 Comments
Jamie M.
onpro version is 200€ a year?? haha, i think i’ll take the free offerings
Jamie M.
onslightly mistaken. the sub is for every technology offered on their site, not just these plugins. all in all, pretty cool
Mike
onDid anyone find a way to buy their plugins separately? This one sounds good, and I’d pay for something like it:
“Spectral Morphing Premium: The plugin allows you to apply the spectral characteristics of a side-chain sound to a source sound in order to transform its timbre”
Not selling these by themselves, and only as part of some gigantic obscure membership package that no musician is interested in, would be ridiculous.
Tom
onIRCAM isn’t a company, it is a public research institute.
It usually collaborates with an implemented business company like Flux for public releases.
Tomislav Zlatic
onThank you for the clarification. I will update the article to reflect this.
Kieran
onI found out about IRCAM fairly recently when I got stuck in doom mode going down the AI music hole. They have some crazy projects, but the brains behind some of these projects made me even more concerned for the near future.
I think it won’t be long until bedroom producers remain bedroom producers, and rising above just becomes a skillless single click lotto trying to get the winning algo. Think I slipped into doom mode again.
MRG
onWhen we didn’t need horses anymore, we put them in lasagnas. With AI we’ll do the same with Direct-to-Video/Syfy/Shark-whatever/Asylum movie soundtrack composers.
I meant find another use for, not put ’em in lasagnas. Well, perhaps…
Kieran
onLife in a lasagne doesn’t sound so bad.
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onhave to create an account
Boogie
onDoes the low energy on Spectral Clipping works like an upward comp? Am I getting it right or?