As I get acquainted with the latest spatial audio mapping and motion path tools like SpatGRIS, Playtime, and Grapes – all amazing plugins with their own unique best features – I still miss a few things about Spatial Studio — the Unity-like hierarchy of objects, property and behavior inheritance, the uncluttered canvas, to be sure, but also I miss the standalone app aspect of it.

It doesn’t depend on a DAW to operate, and I’m realizing now how transformative the experience of working in it was — it made me design in a less linear way, composing in procedural clusters, grains and swarms of sounds instead of tracks. I started to see the DAW as a hinderance, or a scratchpad to sketch up elements and tiny events first, before going to Studio where the ‘real’ work was done. I went back through some folders and grabbed another Spatial scene capture and listened to it. It’s so nice how good it sounds without connecting to the actual speaker array I was mapping to when I made this, even though I think it just uses Apple’s built-in HRTF algorithm for stereo monitoring and playback. Thought I’d share.