Spherify 1.3.1 is out — Monitor, Patchbay, the Spatial FX panel, and a manual that answers you
This is the biggest release we've put out. Rather than a long list of small things, 1.3.1 adds four areas that weren't in Spherify before, and finishes several that were half-built.
Here's what's actually new.
Monitor — measure your room, and mix against the truth
There's a new workspace:
Monitor, on the workspace rail or
Command+6.
Spatial mixing quietly assumes your speakers are telling you the truth. If one is further away than the others, or louder, or sitting in a corner that lifts its bass, every placement decision you make is compensating for the room instead of serving the mix. Monitor measures that and corrects it.
It has three panels:
- Speaker Map — a top-down view of your layout, with test signals so you can play one speaker at a time and confirm the sound arrives where the map says it should. No correction fixes a swapped pair, so this is worth doing first.
- Calibration — pick a measurement mode and run it. There are four, from a full sweep of every speaker down to a distance-only re-measure after one speaker moved.
- Monitor — the correction itself: gain, delay and EQ per speaker, one tab each.
Along with the workspace:
- A calibration wizard that walks the whole measurement through, with a microphone setup step covering input, sensitivity, a mic calibration file, and the latency baseline that makes distance measurement mean anything.
- FIR room correction derived from the sweep, not just gain and delay.
- Bass management with up to 8 subs, a proper crossover, and the subwoofer feed taken after the crossover rather than before it.
- Calibration files and calibration projects, plus import and export for third-party correction formats.
- Monitor profiles, and calibration that survives a device change or an application restart.
One deliberate design decision worth stating plainly:
measuring is unrestricted on every tier, and so is loading. Free can play test signals, run the wizard, see the result, hear it, open a Spherify calibration file, and import a third-party format. What Free doesn't do is let a result back out — saving, exporting, and surviving a restart need a paid tier.
Crossover, bass management and the filter engine live in
Preferences ▸ Monitor, since they're settings rather than per-session choices.
SpatialViz — see where the energy actually goes
Object dots tell you where you
put something. They don't tell you what the renderer did with it. On a layout with a sparse height row, or a wide bed, or a panner working near the edge of the array, those two are not the same picture — and until now you had no way to look at the difference.
Every Stage viewport now has a
Visualization menu.
Two ways to draw it:
- Point Cloud — a live cloud of points that decays as it goes, so you see movement and tails rather than a static snapshot.
- Voxel Grid — the same energy accumulated into a grid, which is what to reach for when you want coverage and distribution rather than motion. It answers "is anything ever actually happening up there?"
Two things to draw:
- Speakers — Rendered Result. The actual multichannel speaker feed, put through an STFT analysis and turned into direction from the energy vector. This is what the renderer is really producing.
- Objects — Authored Intent. Exact object metadata positions — what you asked for.
That pairing is the point. With the multi-view you can run up to four viewports, each with its own visualization, so
authored intent and rendered result can sit side by side on the same transport and you can see where the room is not doing what the object list claims.
In Speakers mode you choose how multichannel energy becomes points:
Spectral Energy Cloud or
Energy Centroid. Either can be drawn with
Viridis,
Turbo or
Deep Blue White.
The analysis is cached, so seeking is instant rather than re-analysing. The speaker layout comes from your active session layout, and stage positions are converted to ADM before analysis, so what you see matches the coordinate system everything else in Spherify uses.
There's also a
DBR Debug Draw layer, which draws scene geometry from the new offline spatial renderer — proxy or visual mesh, with the debug categories individually switchable. It is diagnostic rather than musical; leave it on
None unless you're chasing something specific.
Spatial FX — four effects in one panel in Stage
Stage has a
Spatial FX panel with a tab per effect.
Spatial Echo
Up to
32 taps. A tap is one delayed repeat, and you decide where in the room that repeat is heard from.
The part that's genuinely new is
what a tap listens to. By default a tap echoes the whole object mix, which is the familiar behaviour. But each tap now has a
Sources control:
- All — repeats every scene object
- Only — repeats just the objects you tick
- All except — repeats everything other than the objects you tick
The source choice happens
before the tap's delay and feedback, so two taps can listen to different objects, run different delays and tails, and still sit in independent positions in the room. An object's mute, solo and gain follow it into the echo — pull a fader down and its repeats come down with it.
Taps are also
editable directly in the Stage viewports. They live in the same coordinate space your objects do, so you can click one, drag it, and transform it with the same gestures — in the perspective view too. Selection moves both ways between taps and objects. The tap overlays are drawn truthfully, including when a tap tracks the playhead, and a drag commits on release rather than on every mouse move.
Echo isn't free, so the panel now shows
measured CPU advisories — what the configuration is costing you, and how to take it back.
Spatial Expander
Turns a stereo pair into a small constellation. It listens to how much your two channels
agree: the part they agree on (a lead vocal, a centred kick) is the direct part and stays where you put it; the part they disagree about (room tone, reverb tails, wide chorusing) is lifted out into a ring of new objects around the listener.
Nothing is duplicated and nothing is invented — the signal is split and the portions are sent to different places. The satellites are
real objects: they appear in the object list and every Stage view, can be moved and animated, save with the project, and appear in exports.
It needs a real L/R pair of mono objects. It can now be applied and removed from its own panel, and it runs on a realtime streaming engine, so it works during playback rather than only as an offline step.
Spatial Drive
Saturation with a frequency split built in. It divides the master into a low band and a high band, drives
one of them and leaves the other clean — so you can thicken a low end without frying cymbals, or add bite to the top without making the bass woolly.
Crossover from 20 Hz to 20 kHz (400 Hz default), Drive, four shapes (
Soft,
Tape,
Diode,
Fold), oversampling up to 8x, and a
Spread control that blends in a decorrelated version to widen the driven signal rather than distort it further. Level is compensated as you drive, so you're judging character instead of being fooled by a volume increase.
It also carries a
per-channel alignment trim for fixing a monitoring rig, and in this release the whole trim set is editable in one popup rather than channel by channel.
Motion Generator
Draws movement for you: pick a shape, a size and a speed, choose the stretch of timeline it should cover, and Spherify writes the path.
The important thing is that it
writes ordinary position automation and then gets out of the way. There's no mode the object is left in. The movement shows up in the automation lanes and in the Animation Editor, where you can reshape any part of it by hand; it saves, reloads and exports like anything else.
New here: a set of
visual path presets (Classic Orbit, Infinity, Corkscrew, Pendulum Sweep, the Lissajous knots, Random Wander and others), each with a one-line description;
Preview Path, which draws the shape into the Stage without committing so you can judge it against your other objects first; and generated paths now push into the live engine and write to spatial automation. Provenance is persisted, so Spherify remembers a path was generated.
One known limit, stated up front: applying replaces
all position automation between Start and End for that object, not just automation the generator wrote earlier. Narrow the range first if you have hand-drawn shaping to keep.
Patchbay — a graph editor for plug-in routing
When a four-slot channel rack can't express the signal path you need, open the
Patchbay from the View menu.
It's a proper routing graph: a harness input rail, plug-in nodes, a harness output rail. Each node shows its negotiated buses as input and output pins, and cables connect channels — a sidechain input is just a channel on a sidechain bus.
- Drag pin to pin to add a cable; drag a node to reposition it; shift-drag to batch-connect a whole channel run at once.
- Node menus open the plug-in editor, configure the main bus, or remove the node.
- Main-bus layouts are probed from the hosted plug-in before they're applied, including plug-ins that report arbitrary widths.
- Every edit is validated before it's accepted, so a connection the graph can't support is refused rather than applied and left to fail during playback. Cycles, bad directions, out-of-range channels and duplicate cables are all rejected. Different sources feeding one destination sum there.
- Latency along every path in the graph is compensated.
- The patchbay is stored as its own project document with undo and dirty state, so changing the active scene doesn't silently replace your routing.
Alongside it, object plug-in hosting got firmer: a single hosted instance per slot shared by the graph and the editor, object-attached plug-in groups with delay compensation, grouped stereo-pair slots that commit their edits together so one member can't drift from the other, and a tab bar in the Add-Plugin chooser for grouping results.
Import a folder of stems
You can now point Spherify at a folder of stems and have it work out what they are — and, if you don't have one open,
the import can create the project it imports into.
Filename role detection is much wider, instrument classifiers are reused across a folder rather than re-run per file, naming policy carries through the import, and the review step
detects and reviews stem instruments with polished display names. You can
preview the stems in the review before committing.
A complete in-app manual
Press
F1. There's now a dockable help panel with contextual help — it opens on the page for whatever you're looking at, and it covers the whole application: getting started, concepts, Stage, Timeline, Mix, Master, Monitor, Settings, Projects, Workflows, and a reference section with a glossary, keyboard shortcuts, supported formats, file locations, troubleshooting, and a
tier comparison that states the policy the app actually enforces rather than a marketing summary.
Smaller things that add up
- Compact mixer strips. The Mix workspace has Comfortable and Compact densities for the same strips. Compact keeps the identity colour, fader, peak and loudness meters, mute/solo and the EQ and dynamics mini-previews, moving the rest into pictograms and tooltips. The density is shared with the Patchbay so columns stay aligned.
- Every workspace and closable panel is reachable from the View menu — no more panels you can close and then can't find.
- A grow chip and a full-screen chip on every Stage viewport.
- Timeline zoom sliders got a tick scale and a drag that works.
- Per-stage CPU load breakdown in the status bar.
- A bass trim on the transport, and both gain sliders doubled in range.
- Motion capture: stereo capture with eye split, camera preview thumbnails, a per-camera resolution and frame-rate picker, a multi-camera freeze cap, and previews that no longer depend on tracking being active. Camera pixel privacy is scoped narrowly.
- Slicing models now come from our own CDN with pinned revisions, instead of Hugging Face — faster and no longer dependent on a third party's availability.
- Spatial master effects now carry into an object-based export.
- Spatial interaction performance in the Stage views is noticeably better, and a repeating motion path is drawn once rather than once per repetition.
Fixes worth calling out
- Horizontal scrollbars are drawn where they actually are.
- The help panel no longer deletes table rows off the bottom.
- The calibration review opens at a height that shows every section.
- The licence gate no longer deletes the Monitor settings it was guarding.
- Fixed the monitor FFT convolution dropping blocks, and added a filter-engine toggle.
- The calibration microphone reaches the app properly, and survives a webcam being present.
- Spherify now refuses to call a recording of a room a measurement.
- Retired panel IDs are purged rather than parked in the closed set.
- Cold tracking control gate repaired.
Notes
- Tiers. Monitor measuring and loading, Spatial Echo, Spatial Expander, Spatial Drive and the Motion Generator are available on Free. Mix editing and compact strips need Standard. Patchbay routing and object plug-ins need Pro. The full table is in the manual under Reference ▸ What each tier includes.
- Projects from earlier versions open as they were; Spatial Echo taps default to All objects, which is how the old whole-mix echo behaved.
