FIR Designer v4 update adds ‘auditionDSP’ & more

Several of the new features recently released as part of the major FIR Designer M update have now been rolled into FIR Designer v4. Here’s a summary:

Listen to filters and presets with ‘auditionDSP

Use the brand new, built-in audio player + processor to audition, develop & perfect custom loudspeaker processing and presets, without the need to export data to an external hardware processor first.

It runs up to three loudspeaker presets simultaneously in real-time, with live switching between presets, and playback can be mono or stereo.

Screenshot of auditionDSP in FIR Designer

New Polar Map

The Supplementary Responses window plots the behavior of custom filters & presets when applied to a new set of (uploaded) measurements.

Now, the processed measurement sets can be optionally viewed as a polar map (or contour plot) making it easier to identify various on and off-axis behaviour of the loudspeaker preset with polar measurements.

Screenshot of polar map in FIR Designer version4

New Group delay display

View the time delay, through the combined processing, as a function of frequency, as well as independently for the IIR and FIR filtering.

(Available within the Second View window.)

More brands supported for IIR emulation. A new ‘RAM Audio‘ IIR filter mode has been added to the list of emulated brands, joining Lake, Linea ResearchPowersoft, QSC Q-SYS, SymetrixBSS,  Biamp Tesira & Marani . (The ‘Generic’ mode remains available as a starting point for use with processors that don’t have their own branded mode.) RAM Audio IIRs can now be converted to or from other branded filters in a single click.

Plot colors saved with the project file. When opening different projects, plot colours will default to any custom colours previously set for that specific project, and can be modified again at any time.

Upgraded macOS support . Separate, optimised binaries are now available for both Intel and newer ARM (M1, M2) based macs.

Significant speedup to underlying computations. Design custom filters & presets faster than ever!

Various user-interface updates and fixes.

*Demo version doesn’t include auditionDSP or the IIR Reference Editor