Using Master Match is a three-stage process. That mix can be a stereo WAV in the standalone version, or the master bus of your DAW project when deployed as a plugin. T-RackS 5’s new Master Match module is a matching EQ and dynamics processor that enables a frequency curve and RMS profile to be extracted from up to three reference tracks (in full or selected sections of each) and applied to your mix. We’re undecided as to whether or not the lack of CD authoring matters. The whole lot can also be duplicated in a separate scalable window, complete with additional Left/Right and Mid/ Sides VU/PPM meters.Ĭompletely new to v5 is the Album Assembly window, where your Clip List is compiled into an album master - complete with breaks, crossfades, ISRC codes, etc - in a two-track editor, for final export as a WAV Cue, DDP or PQ Sheet. It now features Peak, RMS, LUFS and Dynamic Range meters, a Spectrogram, a Spectral Analyzer, and Phase and correlation meters, all with plenty of configuration options including support for a wealth of industry reference standards. The Metering section has also been rebuilt from the ground up. You can’t completely hide panels, which is a shame, but you can now resize the module plugins, which is good news for users of Retina/HiDPI displays. This new-found elasticity proves most useful with regard to the module panel, meters and Waveform View, all of which resize beautifully. The whole interface is freely scalable all the way up to full-screen mode, and each panel (preset and module browsers, Metering, Chain, Clip List, etc) can be resized within it, most of them scaling their contents to fit. And the Chain and currently selected module are now housed in separate panels, so you don’t have to constantly flip between them any more.

Now, rather than loading modules into the Chain from a row of menus at the top, you pull them directly in from a filterable graphical browser panel, and reorder them by dragging - up to 16 of them, double the previous limit of eight. The new look speaks for itself, and we can’t imagine anyone not preferring it, but it’s the functional benefits of the interface that are most welcome. T-RackS 5’s reborn shell application GUI makes the cramped, semi-skeumorphic visage and clunky interactions of previous incarnations seem positively ancient.

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