Acustica Audio announced that the Sienna Free listening environment emulation plugin is available as a free download until October 1st, 2021.
Sienna Free is the lightweight edition of Acustica Audio’s flagship Sienna ($149) plugin which emulates a wide range of high-end studio monitors, headphones, and control rooms.
The free edition of Sienna contains the Sienna Rooms plugin, the HOG SUN218 Sub room, and over 180 famous brand-name headphone emulations. It doesn’t include the other control rooms (Acustica’s control room and Spitfire mastering studio) and high-end monitor emulations featured in the full edition of the software.
Keep in mind that Acustica Audio suggests that Sienna Free shouldn’t be installed if you already own the full version of Sienna. There’s no benefit to installing it, and it might cause a downgrade of the full edition.
Sienna Free is easy to use, thanks to its streamlined three-knob interface. Once a particular model of emulated headphones is selected, the user can fine-tune the emulation depth and adjust the input/output gain.
The plugin also lets you save preset and store multiple settings for easy recall and comparison. It’s a fairly simple workflow with next to no learning curve.
One minor caveat here is that I always found Acustica Audio’s software a bit cumbersome to install. It all works out fine eventually, but the installation process is somewhat convoluted (your mileage may vary).
On the other hand, I think Acustica Audio develops some of the best hardware emulations on the market. They’re using a unique kind of “dynamic impulse response” technology to capture the characteristics of hardware gear and translate them into plugin format.
They’re well known for providing high-quality equalizer and compressor emulations, so it’s nice to see Acustica Audio making something different this time.
Sounds interesting? OK, here’s how to get Sienna Free.
In short, you should download and install the Aquarius download manager from Acustica Audio’s website, log in using your Acustica Audio account credentials, then download and activate the Sienna Free plugin.
If you activate Sienna Free before October 1st, it’s yours to keep forever, for free. Nice!
Here’s how Acustica Audio describes the full version of Sienna:
“Sienna (Volume A) is an Acqua plug-in suite in VST, AU, AAX formats. It recreates the same listening experience as if you were mixing in top-tier studios, mastering in audiophile-grade rooms, or playing back your tracks on HI-FI systems, car stereos, boomboxes, and more, all through your headphones.”
Sienna Free should work in and VST, AU, or AAX plugin host on Windows and macOS.
UPDATE: Our readers are reporting issues with the CAPTCHA on Acustica Audio’s website. It seems that the software installer can’t be downloaded at all right now, so perhaps it’s best to wait until the developer fixes the issue.
Download: Sienna Free (VST/AU/AAX plugin format for Windows & macOS)
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33 Comments
Tomislav Zlatic
onThanks to BPB reader In A Week for the info about Sienna Free.
In A Week
onThanks for mentioning about me Tomislav 😊
Tomislav Zlatic
onThanks again for the info! :)
Rox Roll
onSo this Sienna Free will will be not Free anymore after October 1st?
Tomislav Zlatic
onFrom what I understood, it’s yours to keep forever (for free) if you activated before October 1st.
TOXIC OFFICIAL
onhow can we download it exactly the link only shows the paid version
and also 2B Filtered is there for free
TOXIC OFFICIAL
onalso forgot to mention 2B Filtered is only free for today that is the 9th of july
Alesssandro Melo
onThe however is the size of this plugin, it seems that it is more than 2Giga, then it gets complicated, Acústica just couldn’t make its plugins lighter, I have 2 or 2 free ones, when inserted it starts to generate “cracks” in Studio One.
Tomislav Zlatic
onThanks for the tip, I listed 2B Filtered in the deals & freebies article. https://bedroomproducersblog.com/2021/07/09/july-2021-deals/
Brenny C
onIt says how to in the post: “In short, you should download and install the Aquarius download manager from Acustica Audio’s website, log in using your Acustica Audio account credentials, then download and activate the Sienna Free plugin.
If you activate Sienna Free before October 1st, it’s yours to keep forever, for free. Nice!”
2BFiltered isn’t an Acustica Audio plugin…unless you were just mentioning it as an aside. But neither here nor there, it’s the 10th and not free anymore.
Ertue
onSorry, I won’t download 2,5 gb
Quickclic
onCan’t even signup to his website
Mike
onSame here. Keeps saying “Recaptcha failed” when there is no Captcha there to begin with. I only see 4 fields for Nickname, Email, and 2 Password fields, 3 checkboxes (all of which I checked), and a submit button. I tried my usual browser, Brave, both with shields on and off, and Microsoft Edge just to make sure it wasn’t Brave being weird. I’d really like to get this, but it seems like it’s impossible. Too bad.
Mike
onOops, I didn’t mean to double. I wanted to delete this comment since it has my full name in it, but I don’t see a delete button. Web admin, please delete both the comment you’re reading right now, and the one above I made, but keep the one with the username “Mike”. Apologies.
drumstix
onYou’ve got to download Aquarius, their plugin management software tool. From there you can download Sienna Free. I just did that on mac and can confirm this works.
Quickclic
onThx for the reply, I installed Aquarius, but once it opens, it always ask for credentials (E-mail and password), if I don’t enter this information, it won’t let me in…
Michal Ochedowski
onOne important detail to add – download size of Sienna Free is around 2.5 GB for VST2. Unfortunately I don’t know about any other way than to run it from system drive, which is a bummer. I’m loosing lots of space these days, for good plugins nonetheless.
jef
onwow, just tried it. sounds great! just got into these room sims, been using the 112db redline and beyerdynamic virtual studio. they’re all very very useful. thanks! probably would of missed this one i dont ever open aquarius
Esteban
onLet’s thank BPB for this amazing news! :)
Brenny C
onIs it laggy and a drain on CPU like every other Acustica Audio plugin I’ve ever tried? No offense intended, I’m genuinely curious.
MARTIN
onAll Acustica Products are probably CPU hogs due to the VVK technology and AI Neural Network Deep Learning techniques they use. I only use them for post production SPARINGLY. The quality is unmatched though
Brenny C
onThanks for the reply, Martin. I’ll give it a try and use it sparingly like you mentioned.
Surya Nugraha
onPretty heavy in my i3 10th gen PC, crackle in silent part, and no AT-M20X headphone on the list, unfortunately
Ferenc Mosolyhozó Molnár
onAloha!
For some reasons the installer didn’t delete the original downloaded zip files from my drive.
I don’t know if it depends on my system settings, or Aquarius settings or anything else.
I have Windows 10 Home 64 bit up-to-date.
So if you feel the plugin eats much more space than it should check the folder found under your user folder ..\AppData\Roaming\Acustica\Aquarius\Stagearea\ACQUA\SIENNAFREE\
I deleted the numbered zip files manually.
I think I will use this plugin to check my mixes on various headphones. So thanks for the info BPB! 👍
Tomislav Zlatic
onYou’re welcome, thanks for reading BPB! :)
Mike
onDoes anyone else get a “reCAPTCHA verification failed, please try again.” error when trying to sign up, when there’s no Captcha on the page in the first place? What a weird issue. Seems like it’s impossible to sign up.
Karl
onYes cant sign up at all! Tried a couple of browsers on both desktop and mobile with this reCAPTCHA verification failed issue every time. Really frustrating, I see comments saying to use Firefox but if I need to use a browser I don’t have to sign up then that’s a straight NO for me. If they can’t even sort out a webpage I’m not putting trust into them as a company or plug-in developer.
Peter Dillon-Parkin
onYes – I got:
There were problems with the following fields:
reCAPTCHA verification failed, please try again.
Let’s hope their software isn’t as useless as their website…
Caysi
onYeah I got this as well, did you try mozzarella firefox?
Michal Ochedowski
onIf anyone is having trouble with some fields not being visible in the browser like Google Chrome, I would recommend Mozilla Firefox. So far I had at least 5 situations, when I couldn’t see a field to input email address or field with a discount code etc. It was really frustrating until I discovered the source of my problem-the browser. I have no idea why it’s happening in Chrome and not in Firefox though.
Gabriel
onFor those wanting to check their mixes on different headphones, that’s not what this plugin does. You can check your mix in one specific ROOM (it’s supposed to emulate the speakers response, harmonic distortion, reflections, etc). However, the headphone profiles are “correction” profiles to make specific headphone models sound more flat, so the effect of this is the opposite of headphone emulation.
And by the way, the headphone correction is disabled if you bypass the room, so you can’t use it only for correction.
Tomislav Zlatic
onThat’s good to know, thanks for the tip!
Peter Dillon-Parkin
onAnyone managed to download this yet?