Spanner: new AAX surround panner plugin from maggot

[The Cargo Cult]

I'm proud to announce our first AAX plugin, Spanner: a powerful surround channel manager, panner, remapper and downmix plugin for AVID Pro Tools.

- it functions as an upgrade to the standard surround panner, giving complete, independent control over each channel.
- up/down-sizes all common track formats to a standard 5.1 output, allowing you to actually 'pan' an LCR or quad into the mix bus.
- provides a pre-fade lfe send
- doubles as an Audiosuite folddown tool for faster-than-realtime downmixing.
- panner follows track selection when using Eucon controllers.

spanner is available now for an introductory price of $199.
offer valid for the month of April 2012.

there are also a few how-to videos on youtube which explain the plugin.

enjoy
justin

[thermisonic]

This looks very useful Justin and I will certainly be looking to buy this when I go PT 10.

Would it be possible to have it follow track selection regardless of whether a Eucon is attached (I have a JL cooper joystick panner) or is there a reason this can't be done?

I have always wanted the standard panner window to do this.

Rob Walker AMPS
www.robwalkersound.com

[The Cargo Cult]

you and me both!
it's the Eucon protocol that causes that to happen I believe.
I think on an Icon you can hit the Select key on a channel and the spanner for that track will jump to front.

bear in mind that my plugin has multiple channels in the one panner window - so a panner joystick could only control one of these channels at a time (or all of them in a relative way). I'll look at this if there's a lot of interest but IMHO it'll be hard to replicate the different linking modes and other flexibility that we get from the GUI. and I think there's a better way...

appreciate the feedback.
justin

[C]

That looks awesome Justin. Fantastic work. Will be buying your bundle very soon. Been meaning to say for a while that conformalizer's euphonix change list feature is wonderful. Could really have done with this about two days ago for quick DME's for the music editor.

Ceri

[garnoil]

Looks like a great plugin that I would use on my work flow.

[mgoorevich]

Great to see you going away from the iLok evil.

[Frank Kruse]

Originally Posted by thermisonic

This looks very useful Justin and I will certainly be looking to buy this when I go PT 10.

Would it be possible to have it follow track selection regardless of whether a Eucon is attached (I have a JL cooper joystick panner) or is there a reason this can't be done?

I think it's an Eucon/AVID thing. Even the original PT panner window doesn't follow the selected track. Neither in PT directly nor with an Artist Control attached.

One more reason for Spanner.

[thermisonic]

Frank - Yes, I spent ages trying to find a way to do this a few years back and gave up when I realised the half-hearted implementation. My slight workaround is to show the track's I/O in my edit window so I can call up panners quickly with the mouse because the mix window is too big and fiddly on a typical mix to scroll through. Better than hitting the 'next track' button fifty times on the JL Cooper.

Originally Posted by maggot

you and me both!
it's the Eucon protocol that causes that to happen I believe.
I think on an Icon you can hit the Select key on a channel and the spanner for that track will jump to front.

bear in mind that my plugin has multiple channels in the one panner window - so a panner joystick could only control one of these channels at a time (or all of them in a relative way). I'll look at this if there's a lot of interest but IMHO it'll be hard to replicate the different linking modes and other flexibility that we get from the GUI. and I think there's a better way...

appreciate the feedback.
justin

thanks justin,

Regardless of the joystick, I would buy the plug in and use the GUI if it gave me a panner window which followed track selects with no control surface. Obviously you have built a lot of different functionality in like the down mixing and manipulation of multichannel audio within a 5.1 field which makes it very worthwhile too.

Rob Walker AMPS
www.robwalkersound.com

[The Cargo Cult]

Originally Posted by C

Been meaning to say for a while that conformalizer's euphonix change list feature is wonderful.

so there really are people using that feature!
even the mixers here at Park Road come and knock on my door when they need a system5 note so I assumed nobody else was doing it.
cheers,
justin

[Frank Kruse]

Originally Posted by thermisonic

F
Regardless of the joystick, I would buy the plug in and use the GUI if it gave me a panner window which followed track selects with no control surface. Obviously you have built a lot of different functionality in like the down mixing and manipulation of multichannel audio within a 5.1 field which makes it very worthwhile too.

Rob Walker AMPS
www.robwalkersound.com

Rob,
for me the main strain-relief is that you can insert Spanner into ANY kind of track without it's layout changing.
In my current project I have LOTS of stereo to 5.0 tracks that have plenty of pan that was a huge pain to write since a stereo-track-to-5.0 panner in PT has 14 (!!!) parameters that I have to write one by one.

With Spanner I can simply use front/rear left/right for both legs if I wish to. That alone is a massive improvement.

The only thing to get used to on an Artist control, that panning is no longer under PAN but INSERTS/Spanner so one press more to get to spanner from the main page but that's oK given all the navigating I had to do before than automation L and R separately in multiple passes.