Christian Borß, Institute of Communication Acoustics, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany, has announced the release of HybridReverb, a VST effect plug-in for Windows which has been specifically developed as a reverb effect for musical instruments (VSTi instruments). The core of this free and open source software is a convolution engine which features signal processing with low latency (1.3 ms at 48 kHz sampling rate) and uniform processing load.

The concept behind HybridReverb is to use a set of pre-defined presets which are suitable for different use cases. Each preset defines a fully-meshed filter network with two input and two output channels. The presets included are based on room impulse responses which have been synthesized with tinyAVE, an auralization software which was developed at the Institute of Communication Acoustics, Ruhr-Universität Bochum. These room impulse responses are designed for a speaker setup with two front and two rear speakers. For a full surround sound effect, you will need two plug-ins, one plug-in which uses a "front" preset for the front channels and a second plug-in which uses the corresponding "rear" preset for the rear channels.

The included room impulse responses (presets) are property of the Institute of Communication Acoustics, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, and are free for non-commercial use. The VST plug-in is available under the GNU General Public License (GPL). If you are interested in a commercial license for the included room impulse responses, please contact Rainer Martin.