Samples Library For Audioease Speakerphone Presets
Brigitte Bjork
You can build complete environments for the speakers right here, via mouse clicks or MIDI.
Several gigabytes of samples and music are installed with Speakerphone, free for use in your production. 5 tables of twelve samples are accessible at a time for playback via mouse clicks or MIDI.
The samples range from extras like knobs and closing car doors to ambiences and music, and they are used throughout the presets that come with Speakerphone.
You can drag samples from the sample bay to your tracks and vise versa. And you can add your own library as well.
Audio Ease's Speakerphone was originally reviewed in the April 2008 issue of SOS (/sos/apr08/articles/speakerphone.htm). This year has seen a major upgrade to version 2. The preset browser is now separate from the interface, and Audio Ease have added a feature that lets you use your host's automation to recall snapshots of complete configurations with one parameter. These snapshots are stored in Pro Tools presets and also in your Session file, so that you aren't overwriting globally stored presets, which would be a problem when you re-opened the Session later.
The reverb section now includes the spring reverbs from the guitar amps Audio Ease have sampled, along with more small rooms and five 'outside' impulse responses that aren't even in Altiverb yet. The sounds in the Sample Bay at the bottom can now be panned separately; it took me a while to work out how to load the library samples into the Sample Bay, but when I combined these with the new outside impulse responses, the end result was amazing.
Audio Ease Speakerphone 2 is a speaker and environment emulation plug-in with hundreds of presets, effects, sound samples and real-world devices, classic guitar amp sounds and microphone models. It is compatible Mac / PC AAX, RTAS, AU, VST, MAS, AudioSuite.
Operation is extremely quick: you just call up one of the hundreds of carefully crafted and archived presets. If you're a tweaker, just click 'show controls' and the whole dashboard slides out, at your disposal, with the most minute detail. Speakerphone 2, powered by Altiverb, combines a wealth of effects including a convolution engine that uses actual samples of hundreds of original speakers, a radio receiver tuning dial, record player scratch and static generator, GSM cell phone data compression, distortion, tremolo, delay, a variety of EQ and dynamics, bit crushing, sample rate reduction, a full blown convolution reverb, and a library of samples to combine into entire environments. You want to have the artist rap through a cell phone? Rather than pull up an eEQ and distortion, why not make him rap through one of Speakerphone's actual GSM connections? Perhaps surrounded by the acoustics and sounds of an idling car at a gas station?