The Cargo Cult has released Envy - "The Green-Eyed Monster of Sound Design", a new AAX plug-in for MacOS (Windows version to follow).
Envy is all about envelopes, stealing characteristics of one sound and applying them to another.
It's kinda like a morph, but it's really not that. It's part dynamics tool and part vocoder, but you won't use it for either of those things. It's officially a modulation plugin, but that doesn't even begin to explain what it actually does.
Envy is really a toolkit for generating unique new material, adding textures to real world recordings or mutilating sounds to create crazy sci-fi elements. It can fit a wind recording into a machine gun, add wood to foley feet, it can superimpose a drum pattern on a vacuum cleaner, or pitch dive a vocal 6 octaves just for kicks.
Super tight dynamic envelope substitution
Envy can literally fit one sound into the shape of another. The overall dynamic envelope of the source sound is aggressively forced onto the destination sound. So you can very quickly add textures to snares or horse hooves, fit dog snarls into a vocal or screams into a rocket pass-by.
4-band Spectral Envelopes
Like a very broad and gentle vocoder, Envy can apply separate envelopes of 4 frequency bands. The result is that the destination sound starts to speak like the source vocal or drum pattern. The kick plays the kick-drum part, the sibilance opens up at the right times. You'll think you're hearing voices - and you are.
Continuously variable pitch envelopes
Yes, you can actually draw pitch bends onto audio clips. You can make subtle intonation adjustments to dialog, or you can zoom out and draw insane 6 octave random squiggles. You can invert, reverse and undo pitch drawing. There's even a variable speed triangle tool for drawing vibrato that speeds up or down.
Harvest pitch envelopes from existing sounds
Envy can actually read the pitch envelope of your source signal and apply it to other sounds. It works surprisingly well, but even when it doesn't, you're guaranteed to get something interesting, as the result is always based on real events in the source audio. So you can extract the doppler shift in a pass-by and apply it to a wind recording, or invert a bird call to flatten it out.
Unique Audiosuite based workflow
Envy has an unusual workflow but it's incredibly efficient for generating new elements or layers onto your existing work. By sampling envelopes into an Audosuite plugin, Envy can render onto multiple files almost instantaneously, generating an infinite range of new material based on your original source.
All new pitch-shift algorithms
These new pitch algorithms are designed from the ground up to work well with isolated sounds like voice, sound FX or drum loops. They'll sound terrible on a full mix, but that's not what we do most of the time. There are modes designed for dialog, transient or rhythmic sounds, and even two creative pitch modes named Bad and Worse. Bad is pretty bad but Worse really sucks. Please don't use Worse.
Intro price: USD$259 (RRP$359)
