2 interesting plugins

[Doug Young]

Somehow found myself checking out some trials today, and of the bunch I tried, 2 seemed interesting, might be worth checking out.

Oeksound, who make the very useful Soothe2 plugin, have a new one called Bloom. Seems to leverage some of the same ideas as Soothe, but a bit different. They call it an "Adaptive Tone shaper". Still trying to understand it, but it seems to act like a multi-band (4) compressor/EQ. In Squash mode, it's seriously compressing, but in normal mode, it's more like a gentle EQ, except that instead of just cutting or boosting frequencies, you seem to be telling how much to automatically process that band, in which it sort of does the Soothe-like thing of detecting peaks and massaging them. It seems to be deciding to both boost and cut frequencies on the fly. I've only played with it a bit but it seems like it may be useful. A bit pricey, tho, at $209.

The other one I stumbled on, which I don't think is new, is "Perfect Room" from Denise Audio. It's a room reverb with some interesting controls, modulation, shimmer, and more - even a mode where the reverb is backwards. I'm not sure I'll have much use for the esoteric stuff, but I thought it sounded rather nice as a short room reverb, pretty natural, like you're just in a good room. Not sure it's especially "better" than some of the other room-type reverbs I have, but it has its own sound, which sounds good to me, and it's $59.

I just have the trials of both, Bloom is a 20-day thing (requires an iLok) while Perfect Room seems to have no expiration, but cuts out every 30 seconds or so.