United Plugins has announced JMG Sound’s Cryostasis a spectral inertia plug-in allowing audio to be progressively smeared until it is infinitely frozen.
The spectral freeze effect can be used to make the frozen tail of sound to blur into an atmospheric soundscape. The continuously variable ‘freeze’ knob can be timed in milliseconds or musical measures. Further control parameters include Size, which changes the time length of the spectral window – lower values sound unnatural and robotic, while higher values are smoother and atmospheric. Wash controls the amount of reverb that is used to diffuse and smoothen the ‘freeze’ effect into a smoothly modulated tail.
The resulting frozen sound colour can be modified using four filter controls – Pitch (the depth of pitch shift scaled by the ‘freeze’ control, with a range of ±24 semitones); Filter (high-pass /low-pass filtering scaled by the ‘freeze’ control); LoFi (bit depth and rate reduction scaled by the ‘freeze’ control); and Shift (the frequency shifting scaled by the ‘freeze’ control, with a range of ±1kHz).
The continuously variable freeze functionality allows smooth transitions between freeze states, or can create time-smearing effects.
Cryostasis uses 64-bit audio processing and handles any sampling rate, as well as intelligently detecting whether it makes sense to perform any processing at all; if not, it temporarily turns on sleep mode, saving CPU resources. The GUI can be scaled to save screen estate or made larger for easier legibility.
JMG Sound Cryostasis is priced at €79 as an AAX, AU, VST and VST3-compatible plug-in (using internal 64-bit audio processing capable of handling any sample rate). A 15-day, fully-functional trial version for macOS 10.10 and newer and Windows 8/10 can be downloaded for free.
