The vinyl path
- High-pass at 20 Hz
- Zero-phase split at 120 Hz
- Low band summed to mono
Limiter(skipped)- One constant gain: true peak onto the ceiling
The mastering chain: Every step, in the open.
This mastering chain brings your mix to the loudness you choose and holds both WAVs at a −1.0 dBTP ceiling by default, or −0.1 dBTP if you choose it. When a mix cannot get that loud without crossing it, you get the loudest master that stays under it, with the shortfall in writing.
−1.0 dBTP ceiling · the default, one line for every loudness choice
- InYour mixWAV, AIFF, FLAC, MP3
- Measured beforeMeasureLUFS · true peak · range · tilt
- Section 2Set the tone from your mixOne small curve · checked after limiting
- Section 4 held, never tradedSection 3Gain searchgainclipper*limitermeasurekeeps best of all evaluations
- both WAVs heldSection 1Render24-bit WAV · 16-bit WAV · MP3 320
- checkedSection 5Measured againOn the delivered file
- OutDeliveredshortfall in writing, if any
Section 1 Your sample rate is keptThe 24-bit WAV at source rate · the 16-bit WAV is 44.1 kHz · the MP3 tops out at 48 kHz
Where the target comes from
The target starts with your mix.
The tone target is your own mix with one small curve added. The curve is the median change a working mastering engineer made across 17 masters from one soundtrack album, measured from the mix he received to the master he delivered.
A match to somebody else’s record can move a mix’s balance and width a long way. Here the balance you made stays yours: no band of the curve moves more than 1.5 dB, and nothing pulls the stereo width toward another record.
What you are not asked
There is no genre to pick.
Earlier builds asked you to classify your own music before you had heard anything, out of a short list. It was the wrong question to put to someone holding a mix: a borderline record has no right answer, and a wrong one quietly moved the tonal target. The list is gone. The target starts from the mix itself, and the same small curve goes on every mix.
What this changes
The result depends on your audio
The same measurement, the same tone stage, the same gain search and the same ceiling for every mix. What it does depends on your audio rather than on how you would have labelled it.
If your music sits between styles
That is the normal case
Metal, jazz, R&B, anything crossing two rooms at once — none of it needs a label now. The tone stage starts from what your mix actually does, not from a category.
Inside the render
What actually happens to the audio.
-
Your sample rate is kept
The master is produced at the sample rate of the file you sent. A 96 kHz mix is corrected, limited and rendered at 96 kHz, and no stage moves it to a fixed internal rate. A conversion you did not ask for is a decision made on your behalf, and it is not reversible. The two other files are conversions by definition: the 16-bit WAV is 44.1 kHz, and the MP3 tops out at 48 kHz.
Output24-bit WAV at source rate
What a 96 kHz mix comes back as - 24-bit WAV
- 96kHz
- 16-bit WAV
- 44.1kHz
- MP3 320
- 48kHz
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A tone target built from your mix
The chain takes your mix’s own loud spectrum and adds the one small curve. It limits the mix, measures what came out against that target, corrects any drift and searches for the gain again, so tone and loudness settle together and the ceiling is never traded away. The legacy vinyl preset is the exception: it still matches toward one finished master.
Targetyour mix plus one curveCheckedafter limiting
Illustration: tonal balance before and after the tone stage -
The gain is found by search
Reaching a loudness target under a true-peak ceiling is a search, and the section below is why. The chain evaluates candidate gains, measures what the limiter actually did to each one, and keeps the best result it has seen — never the last one it tried.
Keepsbest of all evaluations
Illustration: candidate gains, each measured after the limiter -
The ceiling is not part of the trade
When a target cannot be reached without breaching the ceiling, the chain gives up loudness. It never gives up the ceiling — the ceiling is the reason the target was unreachable. You get the loudest compliant master and the shortfall in writing, not a WAV that quietly clips. At the default −1.0 dBTP, the MP3 is checked after encoding and encoded again slightly quieter if it would peak above 0.0 dBTP. At −0.1 it can peak higher than the WAV, and its peak is measured rather than held.
True peakmeasured at 4× oversampling
Example: a target the mix cannot reach -
The delivered file is measured again
Every rendered file is decoded and checked again for length and invalid samples, both WAVs are held to the ceiling, and the 24-bit WAV’s loudness is checked against the target, or against what mastering reached when the target was out of reach — so a botched resample or a corrupt write is caught on the file you would have downloaded, not on the one in memory a stage earlier.
Checkedon the delivered file
Checks on a delivered test master at the −0.1 dBTP option (−9.06 LUFS against a −9 target), staging File True peak Against −0.1 dBTP 24-bit WAV −0.39dBTP Held 16-bit 44.1 kHz WAV −0.33dBTP Held MP3 320 −0.26dBTP Measured
The thing that cost the most time
Turning it up can make it measure quieter.
The obvious way to hit a loudness target is arithmetic: measure the track, subtract, apply the difference, limit, repeat. That version shipped first and looked correct, because the test material never happened to break it.
On sparse, high-crest-factor material against the tightest preset, the amount of loudness the limiter ate grew with every pass instead of shrinking — 0.57 LU, then 1.14, then 1.27 — and the measured loudness got worse for the first three iterations before crawling back. It finished 0.80 LU short of the target, against a tolerance of 0.5.
The textbook fix is root-finding: treat gain against measured loudness as a monotone function and bisect. A fine sweep of the same material found loudness rising smoothly to a peak, then dropping into a flatter, worse plateau for every higher gain tested — confirmed all the way out to +40 dB.
The consequence is not academic. At the analytic starting point the function reads “too quiet”, so bisection says increase the gain — walking directly into the worse plateau, where it never crosses zero. The right move on that material was to turn it down.
- Pass 1
- 0.57LU
- Pass 2
- 1.14LU
- Pass 3
- 1.27LU
Finished 0.80 LU short, against a 0.5 LU tolerance.
What that means for your track
The shipped search evaluates candidates across the range and keeps the best result it has seen, rather than trusting a direction of travel — which is why it held on material a root-finder walks away from. That was settled the expensive way, with an exhaustive sweep at 0.005 dB resolution over the same track: it found no better answer than the one the search had already returned.
The chain has changed since. On the three louder choices a clipper now sits ahead of the limiter and buys back headroom the limiter used to spend, and that track reaches its target outright; a 65-seed synthetic sweep of the original limiter presets, run on 26 August 2026, came back with nothing short. When a track genuinely cannot reach a target under its ceiling, the master is still delivered — the loudest compliant one — with the shortfall stated rather than the job refused.
One legacy target runs no limiter
The vinyl preset runs a different chain.
Cutting engineers and pressing plants mostly ask for headroom, controlled lows, no sub-sonic energy and little or no limiting, and they make the loudness decision at the lathe. The vinyl preset is kept for saved jobs and retries; new uploads offer the four loudness choices.
So the vinyl path skips the limiter entirely. It high-passes at 20 Hz to remove sub-sonic rumble, splits the signal at 120 Hz with a zero-phase crossover, and sums the low band to mono — the side signal is about 10 dB down at 100 Hz and 6 dB at the split, while the two bands still reconstruct the input exactly — and then applies a single constant gain so the true peak lands on the ceiling.
That last claim is the one worth proving rather than asserting, because “no limiting” is easy to say and invisible to check. There is a test that independently reconstructs the recipe and asserts the real output is that reconstruction times one constant — and it was verified by mutation: injecting a real limiter into the path pushed the measurement 150× past the threshold.
Questions
What people ask about the chain.
Is a mastering engineer involved?
Yes. The chain was built by a working mastering engineer. The tone curve comes from his own masters, and he set the targets the chain aims at. He does not touch your individual track — this is automatic mastering. What he built is the thing your mix is measured against.
Is this the same as a plugin chain on my master bus?
No. A plugin chain applies the settings you dialled in. This measures your mix, builds a tone target from it, then searches for the gain that reaches your loudness target without breaching the true-peak ceiling.
Why does the same track sound different at a different target?
Because the target changes how much limiting is needed, and limiting is not a volume control. A −9 LUFS master is not a −14 master turned up — the dynamic shaping that got it there stays in the file at any playback level. That is why the target is a choice you make rather than one we make.
What happens if my mix cannot reach the target I picked?
You get the loudest master that stays under the ceiling, plus the shortfall stated as a number. The job is not failed and the file is not withheld. The ceiling is never traded to close the gap, because the ceiling is why the gap exists.
Should I bounce with a limiter on the master bus?
Better not to, if you have the choice. Limiting already applied cannot be undone, so it constrains what the chain can do and it distorts the measurement of what you sent. A clean, unclipped mix with no limiter on the master bus gives the most room to work; the exact peak level matters less.
Hear it on something you know.
The whole master plays free at its mastered loudness against your own mix, with every measurement shown. You pay when you want the file.
Active Unlimited covers mastering downloads and cover generation, release planning, stage plots, setlists and band finance. See the plan inclusions.