Audio Ease Speakerphone

Let me risk being repetitive and say once again that the tools being placed before the audio-post community keep getting better, easier to use, and less expensive. Software designers such as those at Audio Ease understand that in order to maximize their customer base, the products must balance power and ease of use. In the past, we've discussed Altiverb, Audio Ease's flagship convolution-reverb product (see digitalcontentproducer.com/soundforpic/revfeat/audio_ease_altiverb). This month, we'll take a look at Speakerphone,the company's latest application. If you'd like to increase the chances that you'll be able to keep your audio-post work inhouse, this is a product you should know about.

Speakerphone ships with more than 5GB of ambience samples, 500 presets, and one goal: to help you place your audio files in almost any virtual space imaginable - such as in a stadium, on the radio, or over a megaphone.

For example: You recorded a pair of actors directly to a hard drive in your studio, but according to the script, they're speaking on the telephone. No problem. Not only is there a classic phone preset, there are others that will place the actors in a variety of environments - and you can choose from multiple land-line and cell-phone connection types.

Speakerphone is a cross-platform product. I installed it on a Windows XP computer. For some reason, my first attempt did not properly execute the installation; the plug-in installed, but the associated samples did not. Running the installer a second time solved the problem.

If you're squeamish about tweaking audio parameters, the Speakerphone presets will suffice most of the time. But it's easy to edit the program's parameters. Perhaps your film begins with a scene set in the 1920s. You've licensed a piece of orchestral stock music written in the rhumba style, but the recording is too clean.

You choose "78rpm-wow and crackles" from the preset list, and it sounds good. Your clean track passes through the impulses of an ancient 78rpm machine like the one your great grandma used to play her Enrico Caruso collection. Doing so makes it sound like an...