TG Spaces

A convolution reverb for Windows and macOS with 190 places in it, and controls a blind engineer can read.

Version 1.0, out now. The room controls glide instead of stepping, small rooms have real room modes, and the catalogue went from 112 spaces to 190. Jump to the downloads.

Put it on a track, pick a space, and your sound is in that space. A bedroom, a cathedral, an open field, a drive-through speaker. Then move around inside it.

Hear it first, one piece of music through eight of these places, in your browser, nothing to install.

The rooms are built, not recorded

Not recordings of real halls, but a room-acoustics model: walls, materials, distances, the top end air swallows over a long throw. Each response is built when you ask for it.

So room size builds a bigger room rather than stretching a recording, and distance moves you rather than fading one in.

Every space is original work. Nothing sampled or licensed.

What is new in 1.0

The room controls glide. Distance and Listener angle no longer step under automation, the positions either side of where you are standing get built in advance and crossfaded, so a fast sweep moves smoothly.

Space, Room size and Decay still rebuild the room from scratch, so a fast move between two very different rooms is audible as a change. To move a sound across a room, automate Distance.

Small rooms sound small. Below a certain frequency a small room rings at pitches set by its own dimensions. That is now modelled, so a bedroom, a car interior and a cardboard box each have their own character rather than sharing a short generic decay.

Big rooms decay on more than one slope. A cathedral's nave and its side aisles empty at different rates, so the tail bends partway down instead of falling in a straight line.

Speakers distort. The megaphone, the PA and the small radios are real device models now, they compress and break up when driven hard and clean up when they are not. Before, they were filters.

78 new spaces, and every original one rebuilt as a specific place rather than a set of numbers.

What is in it

190 spaces, grouped so they are quick to move through by ear:

• Rooms, 26, bedroom, kitchen, tiled bathroom, hallway, stairwell, basement, garage, empty apartment.
• Studio, 15, vocal booth, drum room, live room, echo chamber, scoring stage.
• Venues, 23, jazz club, small theatre, concert hall, opera house, stone church, cathedral, arena, stadium.
• Large indoor, 25, gymnasium, swimming pool hall, train station, airport terminal, aircraft hangar, underground car park.
• Enclosed, 20, car interior, bus, airplane cabin, elevator, phone booth, shipping container, cardboard box.
• Outdoor, 21, open field, forest clearing, canyon, city street, narrow alley, courtyard, under a bridge, road tunnel.
• Through a speaker, 48, a PA in a bar, a TV across the living room, a laptop speaker, an intercom, a drive-through, a megaphone, a telephone earpiece. Not a room around the sound, but a device playing it.
• Unusual, 12, cave, cistern, grain silo, bell tower, anechoic chamber.

A binaural mode. On headphones, with a modelled head: a source straight ahead sits centre, and turning the listener moves it around you with real interaural timing and head shadow. Speakers mode uses a mono-safe stereo pair instead, so a mix made with it will not collapse when summed.

The parts that matter if you cannot see

Every control is a named parameter that speaks its value in words. In Reaper with OSARA, press P and arrow through them:

Room info reads you the specification of the space you are in, its dimensions and how long it rings, without playing anything.

Distance is real metres for the room you are actually in, not a percentage to translate.

Zero degrees means facing the source in all 190 rooms, so there is no arbitrary compass direction to learn first.

Category and Space in category let you move through the library a group at a time instead of arrowing past everything.

All 190 spaces are presets, so they appear in Reaper's preset dropdown as well as the parameter list.

There is no custom plugin window, deliberately. A drawn interface would look better and work worse.

What it runs in

Windows, 64-bit, VST3, built and tested in Reaper.

macOS 10.13 or later, VST3 for Reaper, and an Audio Unit for Logic Pro, GarageBand and MainStage. Both universal binaries: native on Apple silicon and Intel, no Rosetta.

The Audio Unit passes auval with no errors or warnings, the same gate Logic applies before it will load a plugin.

It is a standard VST3, so it should also load in Cubase, Nuendo, Studio One, Ableton Live, FL Studio, Bitwig, Cakewalk and Waveform, untested, and whether your screen reader reads the parameters is down to the DAW. Reaper with OSARA is where that works today. Pro Tools would need AAX.

Old sessions still work

A project saved with 0.9 opens and sounds as it did. Every original space kept its place in the list, and a pre-1.0 session loads on the old engine automatically.

A Model version control switches between the current engine and the 0.9 one, if you want an old sound in a new project.

Known rough edges

A few of the largest spaces, the airport terminal and the stone church, ring longer than the real buildings do. Being tuned against measured figures; not finished.

Loudness is not matched across the library, so moving between a small room and a cathedral needs a level trim.

Download

Windows, version 1.0

Download TG Spaces 1.0 for Windows, VST3, 3.1 MB

Copy the TG Spaces.vst3 folder into either of these:

• C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3\
• %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Common\VST3\, needs no administrator password

Then in Reaper choose Options, Preferences, Plug-ins, VST, and Re-scan. To uninstall, delete that folder, no installer, no registry entries, nothing running in the background.

TG Spaces.vst3 is a folder, not a file. Copy the whole thing.

macOS, version 1.0

Take the one your DAW needs, or both. Unzip and drop the folder in place.

• Audio Unit, for Logic Pro, 6.9 MB, put TG Spaces.component into ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components
• VST3, for Reaper, 7.1 MB, put TG Spaces.vst3 into ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3

Those are the per-user folders, so no administrator password is needed.

In Logic Pro, restart Logic and look under Audio Units, TG Studios. In Reaper, choose Preferences, Plug-ins, VST, and Re-scan. If Logic does not list it, run killall -9 AudioComponentRegistrar in Terminal and start Logic again.

Both are universal, native on Apple silicon and Intel, no Rosetta.

To uninstall, delete the two folders.

macOS installer, version 1.0

One download that installs both formats and lets you untick either. Use this or the two downloads above, not both.

Download TG Spaces 1.0 for macOS, installer, both formats, 13.9 MB

It asks where to put it. For this user only writes to ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins, no password. For all users writes to /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins and asks for your administrator password. Reaper and Logic scan both, so the first skips the prompt for nothing.

Either way it rebuilds Logic's Audio Unit cache before it finishes, so Logic lists TG Spaces the next time it starts.

If macOS says the installer "is damaged and can't be opened", it is not damaged. That is what Gatekeeper says about any installer not signed with a paid Apple developer certificate, and this one is not signed yet.

On macOS 15 Sequoia and later, including macOS 26 Tahoe: open the installer and let it be refused, then open System Settings, go to Privacy and Security, scroll to the Security section near the bottom, and choose Open Anyway next to the message naming TG Spaces. Confirm with your password or Touch ID. The installer then opens normally. Once only.

On macOS 14 Sonoma and earlier: Control-click the installer, choose Open, and confirm. Once only.

To uninstall, run the uninstall-tg-spaces.sh the installer leaves in Library/Application Support/TG Studios. After a home install that is in your own Library and runs as you; after a system install it is in /Library and needs sudo.

Free for anything you make, commercial work included, with no attribution and no royalties. Please send people here rather than passing the file on, so they get the updates.

There is a tip jar if it earns its place in something you make. Pay what you like, and nothing is held back from anyone who does not.

Support TG Studios

Thanks

Matthew Whitaker, contributor, and the source of a good many of the ideas that ended up in this thing.

Everyone else who has had a hand in TG Studios software is on the thanks page.

Telling me it is broken

Bug reports from screen reader users are the ones that actually improve this. If a value reads wrong, a control does nothing, or something crashes, I want to know: info@tonygebhard.me.

Watch

Three short clips. Each one has burned-in captions, and the narration carries everything the picture does, so nothing is lost either way.

Same take, four different rooms

The same recording played dry, then through a cathedral, a car park and a bedroom. Real plugin output, nothing simulated.

It builds the room

Why making a room bigger gives you a bigger room rather than a longer copy of a smaller one.

18 metres, not 2 o'clock

Why every control has a name and a number, and what that changes if you cannot see the plugin.