“Forget presets”: Sonible’s smart:reverb plugin promises to listen to your sound and create a custom space for it

With a lot of reverb plugins, your starting point might be a preset indicating what kind of space it might be designed to recreate, but Sonible’s smart:reverb takes a rather different approach. This AI-powered processor promises to ‘listen’ to your sound and then create a custom-tailored reverb for it.

You can analyse your source material with a single click, and the plugin will then design a suitable reverb from scratch. This is designed to fit the “spectral and temporal characteristics of the input signal,” potentially helping to eliminate the likes of disturbing resonances or muddy reverb tails.

You can tailor the sound of the reverb on a matrix that’s labelled with descriptive properties. This intuitive and simple control method is joined by a detailed interactive view, which lets you adjust the frequency and time-dependent decay rate as well as the spread and other parameters.

This isn’t Sonible’s first foray into the world of AI-powered processing, of course: the company has already released smart compressor and EQ plugins.

You can find out more and download a demo of smart:reverb on the Sonible website. It runs on PC and Mac in VST/AU/AAX formats. The full price is €129, but it’s currently available for €89.