Mastering for today's digital music services

Mix and master for the listener: directly according to the specifications of Apple, Spotify, DAB Radio and TV, MasterCheck will immediately reveal how your audio will sound to the listener, allowing you to produce with confidence and certainty.

Get ready for Soundcloud

* Now with support for SoundCloud and MP3!

Mixing and mastering for the listener

MasterCheck is the complete optimization solution for today's delivery services, a plugin that provides the tools to ensure that your music reaches the listener as expected. Streaming applications, download stores, and podcasts use data compression, volume normalization, or both. These processes can affect your track in undesirable ways: your loud and punchy mix could end up quiet and flat, or suffer clipping and distortion.

MasterCheck reveals these problems in advance and allows you to deliver perfectly adjusted masters for specific playback systems.

MasterCheck demonstrates the effects of volume normalization so you can find the optimal point between perceived volume and dynamics, and allows you to hear the artifacts introduced by the encoding process in advance. You can quickly find the point at which these processes will begin to have a negative impact on the music, giving you back control.

Listening codecs

How do people listen to your production? You work hard to create masters that sound great at home, in the car, or with headphones, but that is only half the story. How does your music sound on Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, SoundCloud, or YouTube?

All major online services encode your music, using different specifications and formats depending on the playback device, connection speed, or even if the user is a "basic" or "premium" customer. Active mixes can introduce True Peak overs that will clip during playback. MasterCheck detects these errors and allows you to hear obvious frequency masking and other artifacts. You can monitor the following codecs, with presets for specific streaming services:

• Ogg Vorbis
• FLAC
• Opus
• AAC-LC
• HE-AACv1 (AAC+)
• HE‑AACv2 (DAB+)
• MP3

Reference and comparison

Through the 'External Reference' feature, MasterCheck allows you to A/B with reference material to check the differences in loudness, PLR, and True Peak measurements. If desired, you can use 'Offset to match' to match the volume for a direct comparison.

'Offset to match' can also be used to remove the volume of an effects chain. This can be useful to evaluate the impact of signal processing, without being influenced by the "feel-good factor" of increased volume.

Flexible workflow

With a resizable interface and many user-configurable options, MasterCheck can be easily adjusted to fit any situation. Dynamic PLR color divisions can be configured to indicate desirable ranges, and meter divisions can be easily configured to show "safe zones" indicating inter-sample peaks, etc.

for mastering

Playback services essentially have a 'mailbox' through which they deliver your audio; if it doesn't slide, the service will force it to fit. A super loud master could win the loudness war on CD, but it will simply be rejected on any major streaming service. This leaves valuable room to maneuver that could have been used for transient details and impact.

It is important to keep in mind how True Peak clipping can cause downward distortion in encoded audio. Intense compression will result in audible 'fizz' and a loss of stereo definition, especially with lower-quality codecs.

for mixing

The most popular streaming platforms now differ by only 3 LU between the loudest and quietest target for normalization. Clearly, there is no benefit in mixing louder than the loudest platform, at which point all platforms will lower the volume of your audio.

Much of this is mainly a concern for the mastering engineer, but if you over-compress a mix, the mastering engineer has nowhere to go. If you compress above the target level of a platform, the lost transients cannot be recovered at a later stage. Try using MasterCheck to listen at the service's playback level to hear your mix in context.

Features

• Preview for digital music services
• Balance volume and dynamics
• Real-time listening encoding
• Master for Spotify, Apple, etc.
• Reference matching combinations
• Ensure clip-free encoding
• PLR/PSR measurement

Typical Applications

• Integrated loudness measurement
• PLR and PSR monitoring to avoid over-compression
• Identify codec distortion and adjust to compensate
• A/B references with matched volume
• Mixing dynamics preparation for mastering
• Mastering for digital music services
• Dynamic content measurement
• Avoid downstream clipping
• FX chains matched to listening volume
• Mastering for podcasts and digital radio

Music mixing

• Dynamic range measurement
• Volume matching on album tracks
• FX chain listening with combined volume
• Preparation for Mastering

Service presets:

• Spotify
• Apple Music
• YouTube
• Pandora
• BBC iPlayer
• Tidal
• European TV
• US TV
• Japanese TV
• AES
• DAB+ Radio
• SoundCloud

Industry standard measurement:

• Program volume
• Short-term loudness
• PLR dynamic range (peak-to-loudness ratio)
• ITU-compatible inter-sample peak

Real-time preview:

• Loudness adjustments (level clipping and peak limiting)
• Audio codecs

Reference and comparison:

• Simultaneous measurement of reference track with mix
• Reference monitoring (A/B)
• Loudness matching
• A/B Pre/Post Mix Master FX with combined volume

System requirements

Minimum system specification:

• Mac OSX 10.7.x / 512 MB RAM
• Windows (64-bit) Vista or later / 512 MB RAM

Compatible standards

Our loudness products are compatible with all recommendations and guidelines based on the international ITU-R BS 1770 standard, revisions 1, 2, 3, and 4, which include:

• ATSC A/85 (QUIETNESS LAW)
• EBU R128
• EBU R128 S1
• ARIBTR-B32
• OP-59
• AGCOM 219/9/CSP
• Portaria 354
• DPP

Compatible audio codecs:

• HE-AACv1 (AAC+)
• HE‑AACv2 (DAB+)
• Ogg Vorbis
• AAC-LC

Available formats:

• We support AAX, VST, VST3, and AU in 64- and 32-bit versions. RTAS is also available in 32-bit only