supperware

Supperware Binaural Plug-in

This a VST3 plug-in (on Windows/macOS). An Audio Unit version is also available for macOS.

It converts most stereo and surround formats to binaural (two-channel stereo for headphone listening). It also reads position information from a Supperware Head Tracker so that virtual speakers are correctly positioned, and locked in place as you move your head.

You can use it to watch films, listen to music, or get a perspective when you’re producing immersive audio. It works at any sample rate from 44.1kHz to 192kHz.

Why it exists

Mostly this is another reason to buy a Supperware Head Tracker, as for £78 you’ll have a good off-the-shelf system for listening to many kinds of VR audio. But also:

  • It demonstrates what the head tracker can do when it’s harnessed to a decent rendering engine (third-party plug-ins exist too: follow the link above for a fuller list);
  • It’s a serious case study for our open-source Head Tracker C++/JUCE API;
  • It’s a novel approach to spatialising technology that may end up in other things.

Installation

You’ll want to download one or more of these, depending on your operating system:

  • Windows VST3
    Unzip and copy into C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3
  • macOS VST3
    Unzip and copy into ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3 (hold down the ‘Alt’ key in Finder’s ‘Go’ menu to get to Library the easy way).
  • macOS Audio Unit
    Unzip and copy into ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components (hold down the ‘Alt’ key in Finder’s ‘Go’ menu to get to Library the easy way).

When you run a digital audio workstation, it will find the plug-in automatically.

Getting started

You’ll need three things:

  1. A digital audio workstation that can run VST3 plug-ins, and preferably can open a video window (Logic, Reaper, Audacity, Tracktion Waveform …)
  2. Something to listen to: a movie file in MKV or MP4, for example, or just an audio file with between 2 and 16 channels.
  3. The Supperware Head Tracker (optional, but it’s kind of the point).

Once the head tracker is plugged in, click the blue link button to connect it to the plug-in if you don’t see the animated head immediately. (If this does nothing, make sure that something else hasn’t taken exclusive control of the head tracker. For example, our OSC bridge, Bridgehead, will do this. You will need to disconnect it from that first if you’re running it.)

You can double-click on the head whenever you want to re-centre it.

Very short user manual

Drag an audio or video file of interest into, say, Reaper, and open the video window (Shift+Ctrl+V in Reaper). Open the ‘FX’ window for the track you’re working with, and add the Supperware Binaural plug-in. Inside the plug-in, select the correct layout (almost all of these will work with two-channel stereo).

If the head tracker is plugged in and working correctly, the animated head will appear and you can zero it when you’re looking straight ahead by double-clicking over it.

Experiment with the environments and speakers by pressing other buttons. The different reflection patterns and intensities are tuned to different kinds of content.

Button-by-button instructions

Turn spatialiser off: select this to listen to the unprocessed audio channels. Left channel goes to left ear, right channel goes to right ear. In surround modes, the other channels are mixed in too, so you can hear the dialogue and surround speakers, but it’s just straightforward level panning with no spatialisation.

The channel layout: Select different loudspeaker layouts from the drop-down box. The plan view in the bottom left shows where the speakers are located and clicking on individual channels, with certain modifier keys held down, can be used to mute or isolate them: the instructions are permanently within the window.

The plug-in doesn’t do Ambisonics, as there’s no universally-agreed way of doing that, but you can audition Ambisonics by converting it into a fixed-speaker format using a specialised decoder. IEM and Sparta have free decoders in their suites.

Reverb ratio slider : Customise your room! Fully left is entirely direct sound; fully right is almost entirely early reflections and reverb. Manipulating this control feels a little like moving the speakers nearer or further away. The 0dB setting is balanced to sound correct: you may find it’s too reverberant at first, but stick with it for a few seconds as removing too much reverberation can make the perspective seem very close and oppressive after a while.

Room : Changes the reflections and reverb to put you in different environments. Speech-optimised is quite close and dry: good for drama/podcasts/close work, but a bit too ‘analytical’ for most music. Mixing studio is a good general-purpose setting with a bit of comfort ambience, and simulates loudspeakers at about 2.5 metres away. Hall is great for enjoying classical music because it provides the auditory cues for a larger, live room.

Loudspeakers : The ‘Nearfield’ option employs virtual loudspeakers with a frequency response of 100Hz–16kHz, and affects the tonal quality of the reverb so it sounds more like monitoring on NS-10M or LS3/5a-sized speakers.

More advanced things

Listening to YouTube / games / a musical instrument / Internet radio …

If you’re using a Mac, you can use a third-party program such as menuBUS or Audio Hijack to listen to your computer audio through this plug-in. This lets you listen to anything you can play (games, radio, YouTube) through the spatialiser, rather than being tied to a digital audio workstation.

Working in real-time

There are plenty of tutorials online that will help you to reduce round-trip delay so that the audio doesn’t lag behind your head movements. Apply the same tricks that musicians use when they’re overdubbing. Most of this comes down to:

  1. Turning down the buffer size in your audio settings to be as low as your system can bear;
  2. Using ASIO on Windows if your audio device supports it.

It will be more sluggish than the hardware headphone amp we made during lockdown with its 2-millisecond buffers, but that’s personal computers for you.

Bug reports and feature requests

Provide any feedback to Supperware in any form (such as the contact form at supperware.co.uk) and it’ll be gratefully received. Thanks!

The source code

The spatialiser plug-in is free but not open-source, as Supperware needs to eat occasionally. A version of the head tracker API (the part of this plug-in that connects the head tracker to the spatialiser) is open-source though: you can use it to build your own scene rotator or experiment with the head tracker in other ways. That part is here. Note that it is not necessarily the leading-edge version used in the plug-in as there’s a duty not to break existing users’ code.

Version history

v1.17 (2026-01-25)

  • multi-tracker support at last.
  • head tracker handling and swapping is much improved.
  • animation of the radar display improved, and some text added to aid interaction.

v1.16 (2024-12-08)

  • quietly rebuilt in JUCE 8 with deprecations fixed.

v1.15 (2023-12-01)

  • fixed a stupid bug in the new profile.

v1.14 (2023-11-29)

  • added Cubase/Microsoft 7.1.4 layout with the back and side channels exchanged with respect to Dolby’s layout (see the ‘Important’ note here).

v1.13 (2023-09-11)

  • 5.1 film layout added by request.
  • refactoring and GUI revisions brought in from Bridgehead 1.21.

v1.12 (2023-03-27)

  • octagonal channel layouts added by request.

v1.11 (2022-11-24)

  • holding down ‘Alt’ over the channel layout panel allows the user to solo/mute front, rear, and height channels as groups.
  • head-api fix: can now change the animated head view by dragging with a mouse, like Bridgehead.
  • head-api fix: compass and slow central pull weren’t turning off properly.

v1.10 (2022-11-06)

  • fixed a crash on initialisation.

v1.09 (2022-11-03)

  • fixes to make the plug-in work properly up to 192kHz sampling frequency.
  • tuned reverb profiles slightly.

v1.08 (2022-11-03)

  • bug fix: race condition caused an occasional crash when changing profiles.
  • bug fix: erroneous eight-channel limit when invoking plug-in for the first time.
  • bug fix: rendering the Auro-3D top centre channel could cause all audio to cut out.
  • bug fix: a path-length error in room reflection calculations caused by fat fingers.
  • added SPS-8 and SPS-12 layouts.
  • tidied up mouse-hover hints in channel layout window.
  • z-buffered the channel layout window.

v1.07 (2022-11-01)

  • bug fix: no longer distorts when used with larger buffer sizes.
  • bug fix: storage and recall of reverberation levels.
  • plan view added with ability to change layouts.
  • updated room profiles and improved the sound.
  • small optimisations for performance.

v1.06 (2022-06-11)

  • settings panel updated to reflect 0.65 firmware revisions.

v1.05 (2022-06-04)

  • plug-ins now signed and notarized on macOS.
  • algorithm: adjusted interaural timings again after comparing with new ITD tables and competing plug-ins.
  • algorithm: remodelled EQ (now simpler).
  • algorithm: adjusted reverb ratio so that smaller rooms are now slightly more reverberant by default.
  • bug fix: now manages storage and recall of its full status properly.

v1.04 (2021-09-20)

  • adjusted tracker panel to match latest firmware
  • slightly adjusted interaural timings.
  • fixed assertions and memory allocation bugs.

v1.03 (2021-08-02)

  • UI: direct/reverberant slider added.
  • algorithm: better EQ so that direct sound is flatter and balanced to a better level.
  • algorithm: bug fixes in filters and other places.
  • algorithm: bypass mode now does a proper surround downmix, and solos work inside it.
  • algorithm: filters and delays are reset as a ‘panic’ mode when changing rooms or releasing bypass mode.
  • algorithm: improved the efficiency of the elastic delay.
  • bug fix: v1.02 lost the ability to work in 5.1 mode on macOS.

v1.02 (2021-07-23)

  • algorithm: elevated cues weren’t working properly for various reasons, and detrimentally affected other positioning in a subtle way.
  • algorithm: improved elevated cues as well as actually fixing them.
  • algorithm: stability improvements when buffer size turns out to be an odd number.

v1.01 (2021-07-21)

  • UI: more distinctive contrast between button ‘on’ and ‘off’ colours.
  • UI: reflects status of plugin properly when window is closed and reopened.
  • UI: snazzy new head tracker control module, with a configuration window.
  • algorithm: new fluid delay, to get rid of commutative clicking.
  • algorithm: added gain steering, so reverb comes from slightly behind.
  • algorithm: conceptual separation of direct and early reflections.
  • algorithm: enhanced and rethought reverb.
  • algorithm: level boost in EQ removed as it clipped stuff.

v1.00 release (2021-06-18)