Changelog

What changed in each Spectral Engine closed-beta release, newest first.

1.0.0Latest

First public release.

Licensing

  • 14-day free trial with every feature unlocked.
  • After the trial, the plugin keeps running but briefly fades to silence every 28 seconds until a license key is entered.
  • A license works with no time limit. Enter your key by clicking the license label in the top right of the plugin window.

Changes since the last beta (0.9.19)

  • Fixed: with the plugin window resized, clicking or dragging a "Making room for" bar moved it to the wrong position (in a smaller window it always jumped to the far left). Same fix for the strength bars in Spectral Engine Master's instance list.
  • Fixed: the license label in the top right only opened the activation dialog when you clicked its edge, not the text.
  • The feedback button is now visible in the plugin.
0.9.17
  • 0.9.15's fix for the 96/192kHz instability was wrong. It stopped the crash, but it did so by distorting the low end at every sample rate, not just the high ones: the default highpass filter turned resonant, with a bump that shifted position depending on your project's sample rate. Fixed properly this time, at the source rather than by clamping around it. A frequency sweep at every rate from 44.1 to 192kHz now comes back flat, no bump anywhere.
  • The limiter could let a peak through slightly above its ceiling on very hot material (a summed bus or a pre-fader signal already above 0dBFS going in). Fixed, tested directly against a real hot signal.
  • AU/VST3 copies installed by the .pkg weren't actually notarization-stapled, even though the installer itself was. Machines that check the individual plugin files directly (instead of trusting the installer) could see them as unstapled. Fixed the packaging order so this can't happen again.

Thanks to Mert Erkan for catching all three of these with an extremely precise follow-up report.

0.9.16

Fixed

  • 96kHz/192kHz instability (runaway highpass filter, coefficients now double-precision + clamped).
  • Crash on abrupt process exit without disposing plugin instances (~60% → 30% on the known repro, doesn't affect normal DAW use).
  • Non-repeatable offline bounces (analysis now keyed to audio position, not wall clock).
  • Bundle ID containing a space; individual AU/VST3 bundles now stapled too.

Improved

  • ONNX inference freezes once auto-detect has settled on an instrument, resuming if content changes.
  • Parameter lookups on the audio thread resolve once at construction instead of per block.
  • Combined CPU effect: 10-30x better worst-case per-block time at 1-8 instances, 30-40% at 16-32.
0.9.15

Restart your DAW completely after installing. The way instances talk to each other changed under the hood, so all tracks need to reconnect fresh.

New

  • Instance List, in the Master plugin. A live overview of every Spectral Engine track in your session: Strength, Role, Source, how many other tracks it's currently conflicting with, and how many notches are actively cutting. Drag the Strength bar or change Role/Source right from the list, no need to open each track's own window for a quick adjustment. Carve, Q, and Protect stay on the individual track, those are the surgical controls you set while looking at that track's own display.
  • SHOW can now be set to "All". Instead of the usual 3-6 worst offenders, every track in the session stays listed in "Making Room For" all the time, tracks that aren't currently conflicting just grey out instead of disappearing. The list itself doesn't reorder in this mode either, so it holds still even while conflict strength keeps changing underneath.

Fixed

  • With a lot of tracks, SHOW=All could grow the plugin window and squeeze the spectrum display instead of just scrolling the list. It now scrolls in a fixed-size box, the rest of the plugin stays exactly as big as always.
  • Dragging a currently-quiet track's weight slider used to make it look permanently active (even with nothing actually happening) and stick to the top of the list no matter what else you locked. That's fixed, the list now shows what's actually going on.

Thanks to Chris Cuomo for both new pieces here, the Master overview came out of his FabFilter Pro-Q 4 comparison, and SHOW=All out of his feedback that rows disappearing/reappearing looked unfinished.

0.9.14

Fixed

  • "Making Room For" no longer shows more tracks than SHOW is set to. In some situations, like a percussive hit briefly outranking another track, the list could show extra rows for a moment on top of your SHOW setting. SHOW is now a hard limit, whatever it's set to is exactly what you see.
  • The curve no longer jumps up and back down when you load the plugin. Right after inserting it (or pressing play), the display briefly showed a smooth rising line before settling. That was the analyzer starting from a wrong "loud" value instead of silence. Fixed.
  • No more flash of a placeholder curve when the editor opens. A leftover example curve could show for a split second before real data arrived. It's gone.

Thanks to everyone testing this closely, and especially Robin for the DP12 recordings that made these easy to pin down.

0.9.13

New

  • Lock a track in "Making Room For." Click the padlock next to any conflicting track to give it priority for one of the visible slots, regardless of score or rank. SHOW's count is still a hard limit either way — lock more tracks than SHOW allows and the lowest-priority locked ones won't display, same as any other row would drop. Session-only, not saved with the project.
  • Double-click a knob to reset it to its real default.
  • Click a knob's number to type an exact value. Enter commits it, Escape cancels. Same on the Master plugin's three knobs.

Fixed

  • Opening the plugin briefly showed every other active track in the session in "Making Room For," even ones that weren't conflicting at all, before settling down a second or two later. Same root cause was also making SHOW's limit look like it wasn't being respected during playback. Both fixed.
  • List no longer blanks out when Strength is pulled toward 0 — stays populated, dims instead, since it's still detecting, just not acting as hard.
  • A track briefly outranked by another no longer drops out of the list instantly.
  • Window can be resized a lot smaller now, not just bigger.
  • A couple of spots where garbled characters could show up instead of a plain dash.

Thanks for testing this while it's still moving. Keep flagging anything that looks or sounds off.

0.9.12

New

  • Lock a track in "Making Room For" (padlock icon) — pinned regardless of score/rank, session-only. Locking the first track bumps SHOW by one automatically so nothing gets displaced; dial it back down yourself and that sticks.
  • Double-click a knob to reset it to default.
  • Click a knob's number to type an exact value (Enter commits, Escape cancels) — also on the Master plugin's three knobs.

Improved

  • List no longer blanks out when Strength is pulled toward 0 — stays populated, dims instead, since it's still detecting, just not acting as hard.
  • Second jumpiness fix: a track briefly outranked by another no longer drops instantly, same grace-period idea as the existing score-threshold fix.
  • Window can be resized a lot smaller now, not just bigger.

Fixed

  • A couple of spots where garbled characters could show up instead of a plain dash.

Thanks for testing this while it's still moving. Keep flagging anything that looks or sounds off.

0.9.11

This is a visual release. The de-masking engine itself is unchanged — apart from one Auto Gain behaviour fix listed below, no DSP was touched.

New look — both plugins

  • Complete redesign of Spectral Engine and Spectral Engine Master, matching the brand design: warm brass/copper faceplate, engraved plates, machined knobs with copper value rings.
  • Every control stayed where it was. Nothing moved, nothing was renamed.
  • Spectral Engine Master was rebuilt on the same UI as the channel plugin, so the two finally look like one product. It is now resizable and opens slightly larger than before.

Changed

  • Auto Gain (Master) no longer pulls every non-vocal track 2 dB down when a vocal track is audible. It now does one thing: nudge each track toward the loudness target for its detected instrument, by at most ±3 dB. If you mix with vocals, your balance will sit differently than in 0.9.10.
  • "Making room for" bars now show each source's share of the masking pressure on that track. Previously the top row was always full, whatever the actual conflict was, so the bar carried no information.

Fixed

  • Knobs could overlap each other and their labels.
  • The value ring could be clipped by the panel edge when no conflicts were listed.
  • An empty bordered box sat next to the track name.
  • With an update available, the top bar ran out of room and the CARVE readout could disappear.

macOS 14 or newer · Apple Silicon · AU or VST3

0.9.10
  • Master plugin: BYPASS ALL and INTENSITY. One button to instantly bypass de-masking across every track in the session, and one knob to scale how strongly it's applied everywhere at once. Both react immediately, no waiting.
  • Spectrum overlay. Click a name in "Making Room For" and that track's spectrum shows up right on your own display, in amber, so you can see exactly what you're carving around while you drag its weight.
  • Alt/Option-click a weight bar to reset it straight to neutral instead of dragging it there by hand.
  • The spectrum display got a full pass. More resolution, correct level readings, a proper frequency/dB axis, and ballistics that behave like an actual analyzer instead of a smoothed blob.
  • The carve curve (what the plugin is actually doing to your signal right now) is drawn as an exact curve instead of an approximation, and it's filled in properly so it's readable at a glance instead of a thin outline.
  • The track name field has a bigger click target. No more needing to hit the pencil icon exactly.
  • De-masking notches no longer stay active after you switch de-masking off.
  • The display no longer freezes on a stale spectrum when the host stops sending audio (stopped transport, muted via the channel strip).
  • Important: restart your DAW completely after installing. The way instances talk to each other changed under the hood, so all tracks need to reconnect fresh.
0.9.9
  • Fixed the "Making Room For" panel jumping around, both while idle and while dragging a conflict's weight. Dragging should now feel completely stable
  • Fixed a calibration bug where the spectrum curve could appear flat or blank for sustained, tonal instruments (violin, clarinet, brass, etc.) instead of showing real detail
  • Added a new INSTANT toggle in the display to switch between the smoothed response (new default) and the previous raw/instant one
  • Fixed the conflict-count selector (3–6, next to Reset) not showing its selected value
  • Added a version number readout in the top right of the plugin
0.9.8
  • The track name is now more clearly marked as clickable (pencil icon): click it to rename a track
  • Fixed the "Making Room For" list visibly jumping around/reordering itself, which made it hard to click or drag entries
  • You can now choose how many conflicting tracks to show at once (3–6, default 3), so the list shows the worst offenders instead of everything
0.9.7
  • Cleaned up a few remaining spots where placeholder data could briefly show instead of real live data on plugin open
  • Fixed a bug where manually renaming a track could, in rare cases, interfere with the display updating correctly
  • General stability and safety improvements under the hood (limiter, EQ, and cross-track detection edge cases)
0.9.6
  • Fixed a bug where the "Making Room For" panel could briefly show placeholder data when opening the plugin before settling into the real, live conflict list
  • Fixed a small issue where manually renaming a track could interrupt live updates while editing
0.9.5
  • Fixed a startup-timing issue that could cause the plugin to fail a host's initial scan in some DAWs
0.9.4
  • Fixed a knob-dragging glitch where controls could visually “slip” out of place mid-drag
  • Window resizing/scaling made more robust on first open
  • Protect, Protect High, Max Cut and Q now show their live values, not just Strength and Role
  • Added hover tooltips explaining what each control does
  • New: Protect High protects a top-end frequency range from de-masking, symmetric to the existing Protect (which protects the low end)
  • Fixed: the bandwidth control had a dead zone where several different settings all produced the identical result. The full range is now usable, renamed to Q to match standard EQ terminology
  • Max Cut knob direction reversed: turning it up now means deeper allowed cuts, matching how the rest of the controls work
  • Role is now a dropdown next to a renamed “Source” selector (previously “Instrument” and a knob)
0.9.3
  • The plugin window now scales properly when you resize it
  • Fixed: dragging a track’s weight all the way down in “Making Room For” could make that entry disappear permanently with no way back
  • Fixed: track names sometimes showed as a placeholder instead of your real track name on some DAWs. You can now click the track name in the plugin to set it manually
  • Fixed: the spectrum and carve curves rendered jagged instead of smooth
  • The plugin now shows a small notice when a new version is available
0.9.2
  • Fixed a packaging issue that could prevent the plugin from loading at all on some Macs
0.9.1
  • Fixed a code-signing issue that could block the plugin from loading in some hosts
0.9.0
  • Initial closed beta release