Impulse Response Utility is a multitrack audio recording and deconvolution application. With this app, you can create impulse response files for the Space Designer convolution-based reverb effect. For information about Space Designer, see Logic Pro Effects. Although Space Designer provides numerous great-sounding halls, delays, and other reverbs, you might want to create an impulse response of your own studio, kitchen, bathroom, or even teapot.
Impulse Response Utility Mac Download
You are not limited to creating impulse responses of rooms and spaces. You can make an impulse response from any device that you can play a broadband sine sweep into and record the results. Two examples are guitar speaker cabinets and hardware processing devices, such as tube equalizers and reverb effects units.
Impulse Response Utility provides all the tools needed to create an impulse response, such as a flexible sweep generator, powerful editing facilities, and one-click creation of Space Designer settings. All you need is your computer, Impulse Response Utility, and an audio interface that is connected to speakers and microphones.
All the parameters and functions that you need to create impulse responses are contained in a single window. The Audition window in Impulse Response Utility allows you to further test your impulse response recordings before creating Space Designer settings.
Monitor, Sweep, and Process section: Contains monitoring and sine sweep generation parameters, plus buttons to deconvolve your audio tracks into an impulse response, and audition your impulse response. See Sweep generator in Impulse Response Utility.
Re-create the sonic responses of your favorite spaces with a multitrack audio recording, editing, and deconvolution utility. You can create your own mono, stereo, discrete surround, and B-Format surround impulse response files and use them in Space Designer, the state-of-the-art convolution reverb plug-in that comes with Logic Studio. And with Impulse Response Utility, you can do all your work in a single window that includes all the parameters and functions you need, including Waveform, Energy, and Spectogram display modes for detailed editing.
When doing sound design and mixing, I almost exclusively reach for Logic's Space Designer plug-in for my reverberation and signal processing needs. Its utilization of convolution technology to map the characteristics of recorded acoustic spaces and loudspeakers (called impulse responses, or IRs) onto any audio signal adds a special organic ingredient, giving sounds character and complexity.
Features True FFT deconvolution
Reversed test tone deconvolution technique
Minimum-phase transform option
Reads 8, 16, 24, 32, 64 bit PCM and IEEE WAV files
Writes 8, 16, 24 PCM and 32 IEEE WAV files
Multi-channel file support
Batch support
Built-in DC removal filter
Built-in test tone generator
Automatic stereo normalization
Inverted impulse response creation
64-bit processing
All sample rates supported
Experiments have been done using bursting balloons and starting pistols to generate a short impulse, with a certain degree of success, but the most popular method used today involves one further step. Instead of relying on a short impulse, the speaker is fed with a sine-wave sweep that moves across the whole audio spectrum over a period of several seconds. Once recorded, a mathematical process is used to translate or deconvolve this into an equivalent impulse response. A sweep signal of this type produces a better signal-to-noise ratio than a conventional impulse and the loudspeaker system is no longer being asked to reproduce an impossibly short click with no coloration.
Click on Deconvolve, and after a few seconds, you'll see the sweep waveform replaced by a decaying IR. Because of latency through the system, there will be some dead space before the IR starts. The IR Utility gives you the ability to trim this off, so use the cursor to select the silence, then the Cut button above the waveform display to delete the silence at the beginning of the new IR. If you don't do this, you'll end up with an uninvited pre-delay on your reverb patch. I also find it useful to fade the ends of long impulse responses to make sure they end cleanly and smoothly, by clicking on Fade to apply a fade-out. Note that once you've started to edit an IR, you can't make a new sweep recording unless you first select New Project.
The Impulse Response library is now more accessible then ever because of Altiverb's new visual browser. Select impulse responses by clicking photos of rooms. Instant gapless loading, organise-by-size, and single click favorites are just a few of the possibilities. The Impulse Response Browser contains a keyword search field, single click downloading and installing of new (free) impulse responses.
Each of the above mentioned plugins need slightly different techniques for creating a custom library of impulse responses. This article is a description of the general concepts behind recording good impulse responses and should be easily adaptable to any convolution/de-convolution tool.
The impulse responses or IRs are captured by recording how a space responds to a full range of frequencies (typically 20Hz to 20,000Hz). This is achieved by playing back a burst (impulse) of a full range of frequencies within the space and recording it. For more accurate results it is common to use a sine-sweep across the audible frequency range.
Recording & Mangling IRsIR Reverb ComparisonsImpulse Response Utility GuideCapturing manipulation and reproduction of sampled acoustic impulse responsesImplementation of Impulse Response Measurement TechniquesSimultaneous measurement of impulse response and distortion with a swept-sine techniqueRecording Impulse Responses for 3D Sound Systems
Any and all third party companies and products listed or otherwise mentioned on this site may be trademarks of their respective owners and they are in no way affiliated or associated with Overdriven.fr or the owner of Overdriven.fr. Product names are referenced solely for the purpose of identifying the hardware used in the recording chain for impulse response capture or for guitar sound demonstrations. Use of these names does not imply any cooperation or endorsement.
REW is free software for room acoustic measurement, loudspeaker measurement and audio device measurement.The audio measurement and analysis features of REW help you optimise the acoustics of your listening room, studioor home theater and find the best locations for your speakers, subwoofers and listening position.It includes tools for generating audio test signals; measuring SPL and impedance; measuring frequency and impulseresponses; measuring distortion; generating phase, group delay and spectral decay plots, waterfalls, spectrograms and energy-timecurves; generating real time analyser (RTA) plots; calculating reverberation times; calculating Thiele-Smallparameters; determining the frequencies and decay times of modal resonances; displaying equaliser responsesand automatically adjusting the settings of parametric equalisers to counter the effects of room modes andadjust responses to match a target curve.
Linked below are a small selection of third party videos that may be helpful when getting started with REW.How to Use Room EQ Wizard part 1, setup and taking measurements (by Music City Acoustics)How to Use Room EQ Wizard part 2, analyzing acoustic measurements (by Music City Acoustics)A short video tutorial in German (also available in English, both by Marcel Schechter)A video tutorial in German about subwoofer level and phase alignment (Pegelanpassung & Phasenlage für Subwoofer mit Bass Management by Marcel Schechter)A comprehensive guide in French by Adrien Perinot (Projet Home Studio)LinksOfficial REW Forum at AV NIRVANA
Thread on REW setup with USB mics and HDMI on AVS Forum
Thread on how to set up your Mac for REW
REW help tradotta in Italiano
Gearspace Studio Building / Acoustics forum
Equalizer APO system-wide parametric equalizer for Windows 7 / 8 / 8.1 / 10
Multi-Sub Optimizer
Convolver plug-in
Texas Instruments Audio Characterization Primer using REW
miniDSP acoustic measurement application notes
REW uses the install4j multi-platform installer builder
TradeFair.audio, a great collection of audio tools, papers, jobs, blog posts and more
Reference MaterialGuy-Bart Stan, Jean-Jacques Embrechts, Dominique Archambeau, "Comparison of different impulseresponse measurement techniques", JAES Volume 50, Issue 4, pp. 249-262, April 2002. Available onlineat _Online_version.pdf
Swen Müller, Paulo Massarani, "Transfer-Function Measurement with Sweeps", JAES Volume 49Issue 6 pp. 443-471, June 2001. An extended version of the paper is available atCiteSeerX
Angelo Farina, "Simultaneous measurement of impulse response and distortion with a swept-sinetechnique", 108th AES Convention, February 2000. Available as entry number 134 inthis list of papers
Nikolaos M. Papadakis and Georgios E. Stavroulakis, "Low Cost Omnidirectional Sound Source Utilizing aCommon Directional Loudspeaker for Impulse Response Measurements", Appl. Sci. 2018, 8(9), 1703; Availableonline at EquipmentThe simplest configuration for most acoustic measurement purposes is a calibrated USB microphone (miniDSP's UMIK-1is recommended) and your computer's headphone or HDMI output. An analog measurement microphone (Dayton Audio's EMM-6, forexample) will need a suitable interface with a mic preamp and phantom power, such as Steinberg's UR22 MkII or theFocusrite Scarlett Solo.
Ignite Amps has released NadIR, a free zero latency guitar cabinet impulse response loader in VST and AU plugin formats. It is available for use in any compatible digital audio workstation on Windows and MacOS. 2ff7e9595c
Comments