There’s a disturbing amount of free sound-making stuff out there, enough to clutter up your VST folder and make you forget where you put that multi-tap delay you wanted. It’s a beautiful thing. So, as a regular, erm, public service, I’ll be semi-regularly rounding up some of the free instruments and effects appearing around the Interwebs.

This week: a brilliantly deep reverb, plus everything from a beat box (as in human beat box) to a motorcycle simulator.

There’s a horrible misconception that music technology is the domain of white guys who speak either English or German. (Erm, yes, I don’t do much to counter that — shout out, my nerdy, pale guy friends.)

But think again. One of the best music production sites on the Web in any language is the Spanish-language Hispasonic (and we have a strong readership in Spanish-speaking countries even here on CDM). Clearly, music technology and the Web itself are growing in popularity all over the planet, as diverse communities grow and start talking about this stuff in their native tongues. Hispasonic was already one of the most mature, and they’ve just gotten a terrific redesign (Hispasonic 2.0). In fact, it’s not the absence of these communities — it’s the fact that the rest of us don’t pay enough attention.

Hispasonic is happy to let you share in their success. To celebrate the 2.0 design, they’re giving away a special version of the lovely Nebula Reverb (VST - Windows), complete with eleven presets designed by Jorge Ruiz (a total of 450 MB of presets, downloadable separately).

Nebula HS (Hispasonic Edition) Reverb, Tutorials, Presets

Updated: Just to demonstrate how multinational this effort is, noou notes in comments:

Hey! You forgot to mention that Acusticaudio (the creators of the Nebula plugin) are from Italy! BTW once you learn Spanish the road to Italian is much easier…

Italy is another country that has produced many developers, designers, artists, and musicians who are expressive with technology. (Take that sentence, apply it to multiple centuries, and it’s an understatement for many nations of the world. Except the US; we haven’t been around very long.)

So go have a look. Brush up your Spanish, and check out the tutorial on the plug-in. (The download page is helpfully translated to English.) Subscribe to the RSS feed, and see if some of that high school Spanish starts flooding back. (It’s like riding a bicycle, really.) Just be sure to enjoy it fast, before Elton John demolishes the Internet.

RaySpace 2.4 is an updated plug-in for simulating reverb in acoustic chambers. It’s got a fully 3D interface you can rotate around as you make adjustments, and, its creators assure us, it’s not a convolution reverb. Instead, it’s powered by bubbles. Say what?

DBT (Diffuse Bubble Tracing) is a highly efficient algorithm that analyses the entire room in a fraction of a second. It traces ‘bubbles’ of sound bouncing off the walls until they hit the listener. The angle they hit determines the pan and surround position they play from. With hundreds of these sound bubbles the listener is immersed in an incredibly rich environment.

That sounds a bit to me like a combination of physics simulation and basic granular synthesis (at least at the theoretical level). I want to work with the plug-in a little before I make any assumptions about how well it works; stay tuned for a review. Here are the advantages the creators claim this technique has:

1. Higher efficiency: “zero latency” (I’m assuming that means once signal enters the plug-in; that’s possible), near-instant updates to settings, CPU-efficient even on longer reverbs (more scalable than convolution and traditional digital reverbs, it sounds)
2. Ray scattering for adding “roughness” and “character” via random reflections
3. Draw in walls of any angle to create complex, custom rooms
4. Stereo spread parameter

The idea sounds fantastic — a ray-tracing algorithm for sound. I’ll be testing to see if it delivers. (Since this is version 2.4, has anyone else tried it?)

Pricing: US$90
Formats: AU
Compatibility: Universal, PowerPC Macs

RaySpace 2.4