Looking for beta testers for our new mastering suite

J

JD Young

New member
Hi Guys,


I’m looking for help beta-testing our 7-step mastering suite… (The beta is of course free, but PC only for now)

Together with a small team of freelancers I have been developing a user-friendly mastering suite for home studio users. (Go to Home for more info and an introductional video). Based on my own real-world experience as a home studio producer and mastering engineer, we came up with a basic mastering workflow consisting of 7 easy step, using 7 plug-ins. This workflow – which comes in the form of 20 page easy-to-read quickstart manual - is meant to shorten the learning curve for mastering dramatically, and to bring consistency to your mastering chain by providing you with 7 plug-ins with matching visuals and functionality. Our end-goal is to bring you a mastering suite/workflow of the highest quality, as well as a website that is dedicated to help you develop your mastering skills in any way we can think of.

To make this all a reality, we are very interested in the opinion of people creating music in their home studio. On our website you can download a fully working beta-version of our plug-in suite with quickstart manual (PC only for now). Here’s a direct link: Try it now. It would be a great help to us if you can give our 7-step mastering suite a try and provide us with feedback… We will try to incorporate any good ideas you might have in the final stage of the development of our suite!

On a final technical note: At the moment we are busy optimizing our plug-in code in Iplug so we can do a proper cross platform and multi-format release at the end of this year (VST2 and VST3 for PC, and AU and AAX for MAC, 32bit and 64bit). Our beta, however, was created in Synthedit to speed up our initial development. Because of this we are foremost looking for feedback about the sound and general usefulness of the ‘7-step method’ as a whole, as opposed to technical details related to, for example, the responsiveness of the gui or the CPU and RAM usage. We have already noticed a huge improvement in a lot of technical features since we’ve rebuild the plug-ins in Iplug. So I guess our main question is: what do you think of our 7-step mastering suite/workflow, and is there anything you would change?

If you have any feedback, suggestions or questions, don’t hesitate to contact me at JD@noiz-lab.com.


Thanks for your help!


JD
 
but I can just use Wavelab instead...I may give it a try, just looked at the website and didn't realise it's actually plug-in suite.
 
Hi Btyre :)

It’s a suite of 7 plug-ins indeed, accompanied by a 7-step mastering manual for beginners. They should work fine in Wavelab. Curious what you think of it!

All the best,

JD
 
I haven't downloaded your beta yet, but I thought I'd offer a suggestion about your site. Instead of using a generic web page title like "Home," you should change it to include your site name-- e.g., "Noiz-Lab - Home," "Noiz-Lab - 7 Steps," "Noiz-Lab - FAQ," etc. That way if someone adds your site's home page to their bookmarked links (as I just did), it will show up in the list of bookmarks as something more meaningful than just "Home," and if someone later adds a different web page that's also titled "Home" to their bookmarks it won't overwrite the bookmark for your site.
 
I'll download this and give it a try tomorrow. I think the "after" track in the video is too loud (for my taste) so I will be interested to see if I can play with the dynamics a little more myself. I'll post some mp3s maybe. Thanks for the beta.
 
I'm downloading it. Seems interesting.

You wouldn't happen to be an Ableton guy? The EQ plug-ins have a total Ableton look to them.

edit: so I just drop the entire folder in the my plug-in bin? They're all .dll files, how do I get them to be .aaxplugin files?
 
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JD Young said:
Hi Btyre :)

It’s a suite of 7 plug-ins indeed, accompanied by a 7-step mastering manual for beginners. They should work fine in Wavelab. Curious what you think of it!

All the best,

JD
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It's cool that you're looking for beta testers, but you cannot advertise in the free forums when you put it to market.
Welcome to the site. :)
 
Hi guys :)


Thanks for your comments and downloads! I really appreciate it :)

@Chili: I totally understand I cannot advertise, and I’m glad you don’t disapprove of my post! We are just a bunch of home studio musicians (and programmers) too… For possible promotion actions on your forum I will make sure to go through the appropriate channels. Thanks for the welcome! You've got a good thing going here :)

@SeaGtGruff: Thanks for the tip. I will see our web-guy today and ask him about it.

@Gregoryg: I think loudness is becoming less important with the equal loudness functionality of services like spotify and itunes. And I’m glad people are getting more aware of the downsides these days, instead of just putting a brickwall limiter on everything. I’m very curious about your results! And yours too @Mr Clean…

@Schwarzenyaeger: never used Ableton actually ;) but I will check out their designs to see haha. (maybe our designer did!) I’m sorry to say that this beta is vst-only for PC for now. That being said, we are well on our way with our official release which will include vst, au and aax. I am planning to do a cross platform beta when we are ready…


Thanks for your help!


JD
 
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OK, well I have come up short. I tried dropping those .dll files in every place imaginable but I could not get PreSonus Studio One Professional to recognize or even acknowledge that the plug ins existed. I even tried copying the .dll's to other vendors' folders (e.g., iZotope and Celemony) as some kind of weird Hail Mary pass. I tried accessing the plug ins through Studio One's mastering suite and even tried setting up a new song to see if I could access them as a channel insert. Still no luck. It is as though the .dll files do not exist.

EDIT: I consider myself pretty moderately somewhat kinda sorta ;) computer savvy and I am completely unsuccessful in getting Noiz-Lab to work with my DAW. Therefore, I recommend developing some kind of installer.
 
I d/l-ed them last night and threw them into my VST folder, worked in Reaper first time. Not sure the limiter was functioning correctly. I put the tune in the MP3 Clinic for comparisons.
 
Hi Gregoryg,


Thanks for your feedback! I am quite certain that this problem is due to the ‘framework’ we developed our beta-version in. We have noticed it’s not compatible with some DAWs. We solved this already by porting our plug-ins to a new framework (IPlug), after which all compatibility problems seem to have disappeared. Unfortunately, we are still busy working on the new versions GUI, so I cannot give you a download link yet… I hope we’ll be finished before august, so I can release a fully updated beta that is also cross platform.

Thanks for trying and replying anyway!


All the best,


JD
 
I'll take a look at it this weekend and see if it works with Samplitude ProX...but I'm not sure if I will go so far as to actually be a beta tester on any involved level.

One thing...I am always leery of anything that applies a specific "process" or sequence to audio as some simplified shortcut to better quality...because audio is not just a math equation that can be manipulated into perfection...it's very subjective and every piece of audio can require a different approach rather than a set of default steps.
 
Hi Miroslav,

I totally agree with your point of view. But I’d like to believe that we have come up with a concept that provides you with a basic workflow that is sound, and gives beginners the opportunity to learn about mastering in an efficient and user-friendly way. After you have learned the basics, you can expand on our workflow or change it to fit your style or needs. (we plan on releasing additional plug-ins in the future to support this). But it’s up to you to tell me if we succeeded of course!

I’m curious about your opinion:)

JD
 
gregoryg said:
OK, well I have come up short. I tried dropping those .dll files in every place imaginable but I could not get PreSonus Studio One Professional to recognize or even acknowledge that the plug ins existed. I even tried copying the .dll's to other vendors' folders (e.g., iZotope and Celemony) as some kind of weird Hail Mary pass. I tried accessing the plug ins through Studio One's mastering suite and even tried setting up a new song to see if I could access them as a channel insert. Still no luck. It is as though the .dll files do not exist.

EDIT: I consider myself pretty moderately somewhat kinda sorta ;) computer savvy and I am completely unsuccessful in getting Noiz-Lab to work with my DAW. Therefore, I recommend developing some kind of installer.
Click to expand...
I thought that Studio One didn't allow 3rd party plugs? For some reason, I'm thinking that I remember that about the version that came with my Nektar keyboard - which is why I uninstalled it... Maybe I'm wrong though.
 
Glad to hear it's not me and most likely the DLLs and Studio One not playing nicely together. I was starting to think I was losing my mind.

I'll see if I can get them to work in another DAW.
 
pikingrin said:
I thought that Studio One didn't allow 3rd party plugs? For some reason, I'm thinking that I remember that about the version that came with my Nektar keyboard - which is why I uninstalled it... Maybe I'm wrong though.
Click to expand...



I have numerous 3rd party plug ins running in Studio One. Celemony, iZotope Nectar Elements, iZotope Ozone 5 (actually just upgraded to 6 today)...
 
PS - You need to be running Studio One Professional or Producer for 3rd party VST support. Won't work in artist, which might have been what you were experiencing. I do not have personal experience with Artist but imagine that was the issue if it was a copy that came bundled with your equipment.
 
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