Overall the Monitoring plugin is a bundle of "mix test" environments. Done in a less kitschy way than those "emulate the mixing room at Abbey Road" plugins. Different modes like sub frequencies only, Auratone-style freq response, that kind of thing.ChudFusk wrote: Wed Apr 06, 2022 11:48 amI'm trying to figure out what this is.Mason wrote: Wed Apr 06, 2022 10:05 amI also keep Airwindows Monitoring on my DAW stereo bus, defaulting to PeaksOnly mode, and will toggle it on as needed (it's just a mix check tool, you leave it bypassed/in one of the "out" modes for printing a mix). Free, indispensible.
I don't know how crucial those are but specifically I wanted to highlight PeaksOnly mode (standalone) when it comes to your question. Well it's off-topic but it's in light of having an untreated room. I flip the plugin on as I'm getting a mix where I like it and make tweaks based on what it gives me. That is, if the bass is too woofy or a channel fader is up too high in PeaksOnly mode, it is too woofy/up too high in real life, simple as. Then turn it off and make final tweaks and output my stereo file.
I will turn the mic over to the Airwindows guy because I do not understand the stuff enough personally;
Here’s how it works. PeaksOnly runs a little pile of allpass filters, but rather than just make them nice-sounding, it expands and expands and expands them, each time phase-rotating things a little more. It turns transient attacks of any kind into a little colorful wash, a flag of energy that stays at roughly the same level, but gets smeared out across time in a way you’d never normally hear.
Why does this matter? Because you wouldn’t hear it. Especially if you’re trying to work on headphones, brief sharp transients can become almost totally invisible, especially if they’re being peak-limited or get blended in with other sounds. That stuff can make your mix come alive, but how do you balance it? And if you’re on headphones, forget it: some peaks are just too brief, and unless you have a strangely powerful sense of energy levels that are normally invisible, there will be no managing the stuff that you simply can’t hear, the spiky intense sparks of audio like you get from passionate performances or tricks like using compression to spike up attack transients.
But with PeaksOnly, everything stays at exactly the same frequency balance (a trick of allpasses, especially mine which are prime-number spaced) but the bursts of energy, no matter how brief, get transformed into recognizable signals. If you’re short on transient impact, you’ll notice it. If you’re over-squashing attacks, you’ll end up with audio porridge. But if you’ve got a powerful, kicking, lively mix… every detail of it will be laid bare, turned into a sort of pantomime that exposes every transient at every frequency. Whether it’s how loud to make that snare or hi-hat, or how much sub-kick you can get away with, it’s all exposed. PeaksOnly is particularly fond of taking excess subsonic peaks and distorting ’em: you’ll never pack too much into the subs again.
It also tries to keep you at a sane loudness level (suitable for sending to mastering, if you really think you need to loudenate).