Whoosh review (MeltedSounds)

Until now, “whoosh effects” (or “the sound of something going past you”) have been made by hand (or by some internal software) which meant that one would have to spend hours or even days making them. In the past there were a few tools that let you simulate the Doppler Effect but none really created a proper “whoosh” sound. You`d still need a chain of processes that helped you sell the proper effect. Now we’ve got two “whoosh making” applications that will help sound designers in this very area.

“Whoosh”, developed by Meltedsounds (branch of TONSTURM), is a Reactor (5.8 and up) based patch which lets you create various pass bys etc. using a custom built Doppler Effect. “WaveWarper”, developed by SoundMorph(which is Max based standalone application), uses a sort of a different technique to make these sounds.

“Whoosh” comes packed with various samples by great sound designers such as JedSounds, Tim Prebble, Tonsturm, Chuck Russom FX, Hart FX and many others. By default you are limited to using these samples and that might be a deal breaker for some, however since this is a Reaktor patch, with a little hacking you can load your own samples. MeltedSounds also made a video tutorial on how to load your sounds into “Whoosh”. The down side of loading your own sounds is that the predefined categories will not change. So, for example, you load various “Splatter” sounds (going to extreme here) but the “Whoosh” category would still be a predefined category e.g. “Animals, Water, etc.”

Another downside (since we started with that) is that this is a Reaktor based patch and you will need a full version of Reaktor 5.8 to fully use “Whoosh” as it will not work with Reaktor Player. A lack of documentation would also be a minus since there is none. All you get is a “Read me” file with a link to the overview of “Whoosh”. I think that was a poor choice on the developer’s side and would probably be wiser if they included the video right in the folder “Whoosh” comes in (just a personal opinion and not a major deal breaker).

Now, that we got that out of our hands let talk about the good stuff. Read the full review.