Nathan Blair Halo 3D Pan (Binaural Panning) v1.1 VST3 AU WiN MAC [FREE]

08/01/2025 | VST3 AU WiN MAC | 119 MB
Your Sound in Three Dimensions.

HALO 3D Pan is a binaural panning plugin. It uses pre-recorded binaural impulse responses to simulate the sound of a sound source moving around the listener’s head.

HALO 3D Pan has four main controls: azimuth, elevation, width, and focus. Azimuth controls the angle of the sound source around the listener’s head. Elevation controls the angle of the sound source above the listener’s head. Width controls amount of separation, in the azimuthal plane, between the stereo inputs of the sound sources. Focus fades between spatialized panning and traditional stereo panning.

HALO 3D Pan is intended for use by sound designers, soundtrack artists, game audio artists, and music producers who are looking to create an immersive listening experience that is tailored for headphones.



HALO 3D Pan relies on head-related transfer function (HRTF) filters to compute the spatialized audio. Incoming sound signals are convolved with a different impulse response for each output ear. The impulse responses are typically recorded using a real or dummy human head a microphone in each ear.

I use the “Spherical Far-Field HRIR Compilation of the Neumann KU100” HRTF dataset for my spatialization filters. In order to perform the convolutions efficiently in realtime, HALO 3D Pan computes the convolutions in the fourier domain. I use the Pretty Fast Fast Fourier Transform (PFFFT) library to compute the discrete fourier transform of incoming audio signals for this calculation. Furthermore, I use an overlap add method with a 50% overlap to avoid aliasing at the FFT block boundaries. This method introduces a fixed latency to my plugin of half of an FFT block size (typically 64 samples).

The plugin features a unique raymarched 3D user interface that makes it stand out from traditional plugins. The 3D UI is rendered in realtime on the GPU using a combination of three fragment shaders. The first shader computes hit-boxes for incoming mouse interactions and metadata for later shaders to use.

The second shader raymarches the 3D scene and computes the color of each pixel. The third shader applies post-processing effects to the 3D scene to create a glow effect. The 3D UI is designed to be intuitive and easy to use. The user can click and drag on the 3D scene to change parameters of the plugin. When the user hovers over an interactable element, a small parameter description and value is displayed in the bottom left. The outgoing audio spectrum is visualized atop the main azimuth knob.

With HALO 3D PAN...
- Create immersive audio for headphones
- Spatialize in 3D with azimuth and elevation controls
- Dial in the distance between stereo inputs
- Mix between spatialized and traditional panning
- Enjoy the immersive GUI

Usage Tips

Installation

Requirements:
MacOS 10.15+ or Windows 10+
A DAW that supports VST3/AU such as Ableton Live, FL Studio, Logic, REAPER, ...
HALO 3DPAN is NOT compatible with Pro Tools
64-bit systems only