Smash Happy Audio — User Manual
Capture any room's real acoustic fingerprint from your iPhone — a clap or a balloon pop becomes an impulse response, ready to load straight into Foundwaves Verb Designer.
Foundwaves Capture turns your iPhone into a portable impulse-response recorder. Point it at any real space — a stairwell, a parking garage, a tiled bathroom, a cathedral if you're lucky enough to get access — clap or pop a balloon, and the recording itself becomes the impulse response: no test tones, no deconvolution step, no separate speaker required.
Every capture is packaged with a photo of the space and its metadata into one file, ready to drop straight into Foundwaves Verb Designer, the companion DAW plugin.
Foundwaves records in a dedicated measurement session mode that bypasses iOS's usual automatic gain control, noise suppression, and EQ — the processing your phone normally applies to make voice recordings sound better would otherwise quietly corrupt the very acoustic information you're trying to capture.
Stand in the space, start a capture, and produce a sharp transient — a hand clap or a balloon pop both work well. The app detects the onset automatically, trims and windows the recording, and normalises the level, giving you a clean, usable impulse response from a single take.
Take a photo of the space right after capturing — it travels with the impulse response and shows up in the plugin, so you always know exactly what room you're hearing.
Every capture is saved as one .foundwaves file — a zipped package containing the impulse response audio, the photo of the space, and metadata (name, date, sample rate, length). It's a complete, self-contained deliverable you can move, share, or archive as a single file.
With iCloud signed in, every capture syncs to your Mac automatically the moment it's saved — Foundwaves Verb Designer watches that same folder and picks it up with zero taps on either device.
Use the share sheet to save a capture to Files, AirDrop it, or send it through any cloud storage app you already use — useful when you want to hand a capture to someone else, or you're not signed into iCloud.
Every capture lives in your on-device library, shown with its photo. Tap a card's menu for rename or delete, or use Select in the library header to choose several captures at once for a batch delete.
| Platform | iOS, iPhone |
| Capture method | Transient (clap/pop) — the recording is the impulse response directly |
| Audio format | 32-bit float WAV |
| Pack format | .foundwaves (zip: audio + photo + metadata) |
| Sync | Automatic via iCloud, or manual export via the share sheet |
| Companion plugin | Foundwaves Verb Designer (AU/VST3) |
Confirm iCloud is signed in on the device and that the app has the iCloud entitlement enabled — Foundwaves falls back to local-only storage if iCloud isn't available, in which case use manual export (share sheet → Save to Files) instead.
Make sure the transient you produced (clap or pop) was sharp and loud relative to the room's own background noise, and that you were standing where you actually want the "listening position" of the resulting reverb to be.
This shouldn't happen in Foundwaves' dedicated capture mode, which is specifically designed to bypass iOS's automatic voice processing — if it does, force-quit and restart the app before your next capture.