Just a little comment to add on the earlier discussion of clipped peaks. I agree 100% that what is gone is gone - you can’t recreate the waveform of a clipped peak once it has been chopped through digital over-maximising. However, if you look closely at the examples of repaired waveforms on PN’s pages, you will see that each peak has been very subtly ’rounded off’. It has NOT reduced the overall level of the track at all - it should still hit the peak of 0dB at the loudest point.

What *has* happened is a lot more clever.

The reason clipped tracks sound bad is due to distortion at the speakers. The sharp corners of the square-clipped peaks cause the speaker cones to react in an unnatural manner which sounds unpleasant. What PN does is to smooth off these corners without killing the dynamics.

(As an aside, good *analogue* maximizing processors tend to give a less pronounced clip in the first place, which is why they are highly sought after.)

How consistent is PN’s volume adjustment between tracks?

I find Traktor’s auto gain set to ‘perceptive’ mode is pretty good but occasionally gets things wrong.

Would PN be more consistent?

Ooops, sorry to answer late, didn’t see your comment earlier.

As for the autogain, Traktor is quite good, but you got a better effect with PN. Traktor only change the gain while PN use a limiter to raise the volume of the track, and this sounds more consistent.

I find Traktor’s auto gain set to ‘perceptive’ mode is pretty good but occasionally gets things wrong.

Would PN be more consistent?

chad (at) mixedinkey (dot) com

I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Best,

Chad Pranke

Mixed In Key
Business Development Coordinator

Thanks for the kind words everyone!

I think that the developers will have problem selling this software as long as they don’t make a demo. Sound is very subjective, and when you claim that you have an automatic remastering tool, you automatically arouse the suspicion of snake oil. PN may be the dope for you, or it may not, or not on every track.

I think it is just a tool, and I like to do smooth flowing PNed sets, but I certainly won’t play PNed tracks all night long, because this has the potential to become boring, always the same sound in your ear.

This software can be a life saver for some bad quality tracks, it can bring back from the dead squished recordings automatically, and save you hours of remastering (that is if you have the knowledge and monitoring environment to be able to do remastering in the first place), and it gives consistent results across tracks, which is totally invaluable because it is very hard and time consuming to do it on your own.

This is a software I believe in, I mean, the idea has a great potential, and can be expanded and refined in a lot of ways.

Besides, the developers ‘eat their own dog food’ as the saying goes, they are Djs, and they use their software to play out. This is quite rare in the industry :) You should take a look at the forums http://community.mixedinkey.com/Participate.aspx?ID=2 you’ll see that they are very open to feedback, and that they have an outstanding customer support.

Thank you for that, I love PN, but everyone should always consider the possibilities in dynamic sound.

I think that the developers will have problem selling this software as long as they don’t make a demo. Sound is very subjective, and when you claim that you have an automatic remastering tool, you automatically arouse the suspicion of snake oil. PN may be the dope for you, or it may not, or not on every track.

I think it is just a tool, and I like to do smooth flowing PNed sets, but I certainly won’t play PNed tracks all night long, because this has the potential to become boring, always the same sound in your ear.

This software can be a life saver for some bad quality tracks, it can bring back from the dead squished recordings automatically, and save you hours of remastering (that is if you have the knowledge and monitoring environment to be able to do remastering in the first place), and it gives consistent results across tracks, which is totally invaluable because it is very hard and time consuming to do it on your own.

This is a software I believe in, I mean, the idea has a great potential, and can be expanded and refined in a lot of ways.

Besides, the developers ‘eat their own dog food’ as the saying goes, they are Djs, and they use their software to play out. This is quite rare in the industry :) You should take a look at the forums http://community.mixedinkey.com/Participate.aspx?ID=2 you’ll see that they are very open to feedback, and that they have an outstanding customer support.

Sweet review.

I agree- sweet review!

@Brendan Yep, there is no way to recover information from a clipped digital recording, it is just off the map. What you can do is get some headroom back by lowering the volume, and then interpolate what it could have been. Should sound less harsh. Dunno if that is really what they are doing, looks like it from the screenshots. I’ve matched levels with the autogain and did A/B listening tests, and the processed version sounded less harsh to me. By the way, this is a pretty extreme example,I ran the song at over +6db, real clipped stuff isn’t THAT bad :)

I like having a eq and a comp just before the final output so that the mix sound together. Doing it in reverse (that is, mastering the tracks themselves) give a totally different sound and doesn’t have the drawbacks (a compressor at the end stage always take some life out of the mix in my opinion).

What would be great would be posting 5 very different songs that mix well, both processed and unprocessed and let people judge. Of course I can’t do that for obvious legal reasons. This software badly needs a demo.

You have the option to save your processed tracks in wav, so no loss due to transcoding.