NuGen's MasterCheck / mastering for the internet

[Piet De Ridder]

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NuGen's MasterCheck immediately reveals how the consumer will hear your productions on todays music platforms. Mix and master to target and the quality of your audio will be assured all the way to the consumer with no nasty surprises after release. Compare and contrast your productions with reference works and learn from the best. MasterCheck gives you the tools to evaluate your work and seize the competitive advantage by producing directly for the playout environment, allowing you to effectively utilise maximum dynamic range without compromising on loudness or risking distortion introduced by mp3 or AAC compression.

MasterCheck instantly de-mystifies loudness normalised playout systems, showing you the effect of compression on your audio so you can immediately determine how much is enough and by using loudness matching, exactly what is happening to the transients etc. as the compression increases. Now you can quickly find the point beyond which playout systems kick into effect, putting you back in control of how your productions will sound.

Applications:

- Audio production to loudness target
- Measuring dynamic content
- Avoiding downstream clipping introduced by compression codecs
- Compare your loudness and dynamics with reference material
- Audition Loudness matched FX chains
- Objectively evaluate compression settings with PLR & loudness matching

Features:

Standard consumer presets
- Apple iTunes Radio
- Spotify
- Radio (replay gain)
- EBU R128
- ATSC A/85 (Calm Act)
- Mobile streaming

Flexible operation
- Target playout platform
- Cross reference other productions
- Audition loudness matched FX chains
- Absolute or differential readings
- Colour banded target zones

Standardised measures
- Program loudness
- PLR (Peak to Loudness Ratio) dynamics reading
- Short-term loudness
- ITU compliant inter-sample peak
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And ... until June 30th, there's a 25% price reduction!

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[Guy Rowland]

Bloody ell, that could have saved me the last three months of my life! I'll be interested to see how it performs in the real world - I had to invent my own formula to successfully predict Spotify, since nothing on the market currently does. If it does what it claims, this will be absolutely essential. Will be trialling imminently.

EDIT - but see post below...

[Guy Rowland]

Had to trial it immediately - initial results are underwhelming. Failed on the Spotify test, producing outcomes which are markedly different to the real world ones (in this area, believe me, I know what I'm talking about and I have the scars to prove it). My formula is still the only way I know to reliably predict what Spotify will do, which is a combination of short and long term loudness revolving around their target loudness level. (I notice that they themselves mark Spotify as "approx" - that's optimistic, not to put too fine a point on it - its close to being a random number generator in my initial tests). Being as it failed on the platform I know, I wouldn't trust it on those I don't, so not sure it has much value beyond a regular loudness meter.

I'll be updating my thread on this in the next day or two with a youtube demo video too.

[Raymond_Kemp]

Had to trial it immediately - initial results are underwhelming.

Surprise, surprise!

[Marius]

Interesting. Seems like this is essentially Ozone 7's output preview module combined with some of the Insight metering and brought together into a single plugin, right? Shame that it doesn't seem to do what you needed it to, Guy...if it's not producing accurate results then it kind of loses its main appeal.

Lots of metering/loudness tools on the market these days that DO work.

[Guy Rowland]

Interesting. Seems like this is essentially Ozone 7's output preview module combined with some of the Insight metering and brought together into a single plugin, right? Shame that it doesn't seem to do what you needed it to, Guy...if it's not producing accurate results then it kind of loses its main appeal.

Lots of metering/loudness tools on the market these days that DO work.

I'd been thinking while I was fighting with all this that a product exactly like this is now an essential. It would be great if Ozone had it built in as you say, just as it does with MP3 codecs (and far more useful in the real world). It would need to be kept very up to date too - these standards are changing all the time between different platforms. Could be a good motivation for the annual upgrade really....

I think the basics in MasterCheck are perfectly fine, it's just the USP of giving you these magic readings doesn't work. You press a button and it gives you the supposed instant real time comparison with the platform you select. In my case, a track I uploaded earlier this week which had a real world negligable 0.5db reduction, it told me will have a -5db correction, which is nonsense clearly. Another which has a real world -6db reduction it placed at -9db, so its not just globally wrong (it's probably just using the PLR figure, which isn't how Spotify works). Someone needs to figure out a better way of presenting the real world relative figures too - you want to see at a glance what an average reading for a platform is, and what your track is, across ALL the platforms.

[Piet De Ridder]

Surprise, surprise!

NuGen aren’t exactly known for releasing below-average, malfunctioning tools, so it actually *would* surprise me a bit if this MasterCheck thingy is as flawed and useless as Guy’s intitial experiences with it seem to indicate it is.

Guy, perhaps it is an idea to contact NuGen and share your findings with them? I’m convinced they’ll be most interested in what you have to say as only a week or so ago, they started an online survey to collect experiences from people who mix/master for online distribution and streaming. And I’m even more convinced that, should there indeed be serious flaws in MasterCheck, they won’t sleep until these issues are properly addressed.

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[Guy Rowland]

Good thought, Piet. If we're lucky it's just the algorithm they use for Spotify, hopefully only this.... I just don't have enough experience of the others.

[Luciano Storti]

Another thing to keep in mind is that so far, Nugen has catered to the postproduction/
broadcasting sector. I'd consider this their strength. Maybe their online tools are not yet as mature as needed, but I have no doubt that they will get there, and rather quickly too.

[Guy Rowland]

[an additional thought as I'm about to write - I think there's a fundamental design flaw, at least with Spotify as I've analysed it. The two figures you need are a) long term loudness and b) MINIMUM short term (by minimum I mean numerically closest to zero - it's slightly counter-intuitive terminology as its driving things into the red so I keep thinking of it as maxing out, but in terms of dynamic range its the opposite of course). So you need to first analyse the whole song before you can produce a meaningful figure - by contrast this works in real time. The best they could do under their current design is for it to keep updating throughout the song, and then you pay attention to the final figure - it's pretty clumsy and unclear though].

[Guy Rowland]

OK, did some more data gathering before pressing send. It's actually not as random as I thought - there seems to be a fairly consistent offset of around -4db if you let the track run to the end. That's actually not useless, as long as you know about it, but I'm curious as to why it is there at all. I have asked...

[Guy Rowland]

Just received this from Nugen:

I've tested the files on my machine and have managed to reproduce the values that you have stated. Spotify are constantly changing their normalisation, and it appears that our approximation for Spotify readings is not up to date.

Thank you for taking the time to inform us of this issue. I have passed this information onto the Development Team who will look into this at the next product review.

That sounds hopeful, eh? This product would be terrific if they make it reliable across all the platforms. Not easy when standards change so often....

In the meantime (bashful cough), my forumla + something like Dynameter really does seem to be the best solution out there for Spotify - http://www.afterschoolvideoclub.com/p/s ... evels.html

[Raymond_Kemp]

Funny enough Guy, I just finished finalizing a song and it is spot on set for spotify playback according to my Dynameter

[Guy Rowland]

Funny enough Guy, I just finished finalizing a song and it is spot on set for spotify playback according to my Dynameter

Smashing - if you've hit both the min PSR and PLR for the Spotify settings you should indeed be good. If one is out, it's worth running it by the formula - 8 minus min PSR minus PLR from Dynameter's readings, that should be accurate (assuming it's not a quiet track / cue), so at least it gives you all the info you need, unlike MasterCheck (currently). Hopefully you'll end up somewhere around -11 LUFS with that - -13 or lower and it might sound quiet.

[Piet De Ridder]

From the e-mail:

The latest update for MasterCheck Pro brings two new encoding flavors, FLAC and Opus, to the music production table. Opus is one of the YouTube formats, FLAC is often used for downloads as it is a high-quality (lossless) format — exploited by self-styled High Fidelity Music Streaming service TIDAL, for example.

Why add a lossless codec?
Like other lossless formats, FLAC uses compression algorithms that preserve audio data so the audio is exactly the same as the original source (input=output). On the face of it, this is true… when encoding within the same bit depth, like for like. However, this is not what happens when audio exits a DAW destined for FLAC, as FLAC is usually used to encode at 16 bit, but this conversion from 32 to 16 bit is not guaranteed lossless. FLAC also uses integers while DAWs deploy floating-point representations, so there is an additional complication even when producing a 32-bit FLAC stream. MasterCheck Pro can now be used to audition those conversions.
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