Looking for Beta testers (major update!) for the Noiz-Lab 7-step mastering suite

[JD Young]

Hi guys,


We‘ve gotten a lot of great feedback on our 7-step mastering suite the past couple of months, and we’re very happy that so many people found the time to try it out! Thank you very much! In the meantime we have been working on a major update of the suite. We improved the plug-ins on many levels:

• We incorporated many clever ideas our Beta users came up with.
• We made the plug-ins cross platform: VST2 and VST3 for PC, and AU, VST2 and VST3 for MAC, 32bit and 64bit. (AAX will follow)
• We rewrote all of our algorithms and made the plug-ins sound and run much smoother.
• We added new functionality to the plug-in interfaces to make them more user friendly.
• We have improved the plug-ins greatly in terms of efficiency, size and memory usage.
• We have solved all known compatibility issues.

In short, with your help and the feedback of our other Beta users, we are now – two years after we started this project - very close to releasing our first official version of the suite! As our new August beta, we’ve put up the improved 32 bit VST version for PC of the suite. Here’s a link: http://www.noiz-lab.com/try-it-now. We are very curious if problems you might have had before, are now indeed all solved by this new release. The next two weeks we’ll be preparing all the other Beta’s for release as well: VST2 and VST3 for PC, and AU, VST2 and VST3 for MAC, both 32bit and 64bit. We hope that there are some MAC users out there who are willing to give our suite a try too.

We are still very much open to feedback, because we will continue to improve on the plug-ins. So, if you have questions or suggestions about our 7-step mastering suite, don’t hesitate to contact me at JD@noiz-lab.com or post your findings on our forum: http://www.noiz-lab.com/forum.

Thanks again for all your help!


All the best,


JD

[Tonmann]

Hello JD,

first thanks for the public beta of your mastering suite.
I downloaded and tested it in Sonar with some yet finished projects by removing all plugins I normally have in my mastering chain and put your noiz-lab plugins there in the right order. Then I tried to achive the same or better mastering results.

Overall sound, design and handling is good. Also, the order of the plugins makes mostly sense from my POV.

My impression of your suite in detail:

1. High-Pass and Monomizer: Great plugin, good to start with, nothing to moan about.
2. MS-Equalizer: Really great plugin, I only miss the ability to change the Q-value by mouse (keeping mouse-button pressed and moving mouse up/down)
3. Compressor: Not so well suited here. A multiband-compressor would make way more sense here IMHO.
4. Enhancer: Hm, I'm no fan of artifical distorsion in the mastering chain. Fair enough it sounds okay for my ears.
5. Stereo-EQ: Nice plugin, but I still would prefer a multiband on 3. instead.
6. Transient-Designer: For me, a transient-shaper should never be placed in the master-bus. Anyway, this plugin does not sound like a "real" shaper to me, rather like a 2-band low- and high-shelf EQ?!
7. Limiter: Nice brickwall-limiter. Still needs some code-improvement IMHO as it misses transparency and starts to pump too early compared to competitors like BuzzMaxi3 or Waves L2 etc.

Conclusion:
A promising package, though I'd exchange the compressor (3) with a multiband-compressor and omit 4, 5 and 6. But that's just my 2 cents.

cheers,
Chris

[JD Young]

Hi Chris,


Thanks for your reply and detailed feedback! I’m glad you liked our 7-step workflow and I think your remarks about the individual plug-ins are very interesting. I’ll react to them in the same order you posted them:

1. Thanks!
2. Thanks again This is an interesting remark because in my DAW you can move the ‘Q’ with the mouse wheel, or by clicking besides the handle and dragging up or down. I’m very curious if this particular functionality does work, or if there might be something buggy going on.
3. Personally I like using a full band compressor during mastering, but I can imagine that you might prefer a multiband version - I use one too pretty often, for more surgical stuff. But I view our 7-step workflow as a basic workflow on which you can expand or change after you gain experience. You can do more harm than good with a multiband compressor so we've decided to leave it out at this stage. We do however plan to release a series of additional plug-ins to accommodate expanding the basic workflow. We’re thinking about a multiband/MS compressor, a multiband/MS mastering reverb and some de-noising tools.
4. I think a little goes a long way in this case, but that’s a personal preference of course But when saturation becomes audible distortion I totally agree.
5. I hear ya!
6. Actually it’s a multiband/MS transient shaper that works with a series of envelope filters. I personally like this plug-in very much because it can really preserve your transients during the limiting stage.
7. We designed the limiter to perform best at a modest gain reduction between -3 dB and -4.5 dB. But I am very interested in making a more robust brickwall limiter for more extreme loudness. Any ideas are welcome

Thanks again for your feedback Chris! Although we are nearing our official release, we will keep improving on the suite for the coming years. So I will discuss your remarks with our team


All the best,


JD