New mastering plugin

[Rolo Tomasi]

It's pretty good y'all. Gotta be some AI happening there.

[David Nahmani]

The new Mastering Assistant is really cool and I'm sure everyone will start using it and it will help a lot of producers perform their own quick mastering without the need to turn to a 3rd party plug-in. 

I'm calling it "quick mastering" for DIY mastering, by opposition to a real mastering job done by an experienced professional mastering engineer. There is a place for both as not every project has a budget for a professional mastering job. 

Now AI is a big (trendy) word, yet I'm not so sure there's much actual AI going on here? 

It looks to me like this new Mastering Assistant is a nice new convenient UI for a bundle of functionalities that were already present in the following existing plug-ins: 

• Match EQ
• (maybe?) different models from the Vintage EQ collection
• Adaptive Limiter
• Exciter
• Stereo Spreader
• Level Meter
• Loudness Meter
• Correlation Meter

LUFS-i and True Peak level targets were preset respectively to -14 dBLUFS and -1 dBTP to respect most common streaming platform standards with some kind of normalization allowing to automatically reach those targets. 

So basically what this plug-in achieves is really simplifying a workflow that required juggling with multiple plug-ins before, and automating some of the tasks to make our life easier. 

[Rolo Tomasi]

I agree. Still though if Match EQ was involved in some way what would it be trying to match?

[David Nahmani]

4 minutes ago, Rolo Tomasi said:

what would it be trying to match?

Preset curves from great sounding mastered files? 

[denitronik]

Or maybe it’s trying to make the mix linear?

[David Nahmani]

Just now, denitronik said:

Or maybe it’s trying to make the mix linear?

I suppose this could be tested more thoroughly but as a quick test I ran pink noise through the analysis a few times and got this consistent result each time: 

There seems to be a small dip around 400—600 Hz (mud range), and another dip around 7-8 kHz (sibilance range). 

[David MacNeill]

On 11/8/2023 at 3:22 AM, David Nahmani said:

The new Mastering Assistant is really cool and I'm sure everyone will start using it and it will help a lot of producers perform their own quick mastering without the need to turn to a 3rd party plug-in. 

I'm calling it "quick mastering" for DIY mastering, by opposition to a real mastering job done by an experienced professional mastering engineer. There is a place for both as not every project has a budget for a professional mastering job. 

Now AI is a big (trendy) word, yet I'm not so sure there's much actual AI going on here? 

It looks to me like this new Mastering Assistant is a nice new convenient UI for a bundle of functionalities that were already present in the following existing plug-ins: 

• Match EQ
• (maybe?) different models from the Vintage EQ collection
• Adaptive Limiter
• Exciter
• Stereo Spreader
• Level Meter
• Loudness Meter
• Correlation Meter

LUFS-i and True Peak level targets were preset respectively to -14 dBLUFS and -1 dBTP to respect most common streaming platform standards with some kind of normalization allowing to automatically reach those targets. 

So basically what this plug-in achieves is really simplifying a workflow that required juggling with multiple plug-ins before, and automating some of the tasks to make our life easier. 

That all makes perfect sense, David. Apple would not have to procure anyone else's IP to build it from the plugin code they already own. The "preset curves from great sounding mastered files" is potentially problematic if they used some popular artist's songs as fodder and embedded those songs into their codebase. It would be an interesting hunt to find a Taylor Swift tune buried in the Logic resource bundle. 🫢

[user01]

Mastering assistant is a genius innovation, after seeing this we want mixing assistant 🙂