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Noise Engineering Polydactyl and Librae are new colorful, feature-rich dynamics processor plugins for macOS and Windows.
The US-based developer company Noise Engineering is known to many mainly because of its experimental-flavored Eurorack modules. From oscillators, effects, and logic processors, they offer a wide range of intriguing modules.
For some time they have been porting their module ideas into plugins. You can explore the special creations in your DAW with various synthesizers and effects plugin. There is also the Freequel Bundle with three free plugins. Do not miss these. Now they are also getting into the mixing and mastering area with two more plugins.
Noise Engineering Polydactyl and Librae
“From the start, these plug-ins were intended for clean mastering, sound design, and coloration,” comments Noise Engineering Chief Plumber Adam Lange-Pearson, one of two software engineers behind Polydactyl and Librae.
“While we worked on these, our chat threads were full for months with picky feedback about levels and sound quality, and heated ergonomics discussion,” he continues, concluding: “By the end, I am pretty sure we argued over every pixel in each meter at least once.”
Noise Engineering Polydactyl
Polydactyl is a multiband processor inspired by over-the-top and aggressive techniques, yet it is designed to be versatile enough to be used in almost any mix. It features:
adjustable bands plus pre and post with separate per-section controls
dedicated distortion controls (saturate, soft drive and hard drive with soft and hard blend for clipping distortion
zero pop for cross distortion
an output level for each section with bypass and solo options
Saying that, the clean interface of Polydactyl provides a huge range of visual feedback. First and foremost, the frequency spectrum meter displays the output level across the audio spectrum and is interactive — click and drag the lines to adjust the band splits; select bands for further adjustment.
Additionally, Polydactyl includes a scalable envelope display to show processing over time and global In and Out VU meters. Moreover, each stage also includes a static curve meter to demonstrate the compression and expansion applied to the signal, and In and Out VU meters.
Noise Engineering Librae
Librae is a mid/side and stereo dynamics processor with separate controls for Pre, Mid, Side, and Post stages. Duly designed for transparency, Librae is made for master-bus applications, but the team behind the plug-in put a lot of thought into making it a capable tool for creative processing and sound design. Many of its controls are similar to those on Polydactyl.
separate per-stage controls for blend, gain, saturate, room, floor, release, and stereo link
distortion, including saturate, soft drive, and hard drive with dedicated soft blend and hard blend), zero pop, and ouput-level controls
pre and post stages with shelf-EQ weight controls
global mid < – > Side balance control
each section also includes a bypass and solo option.
The plugin is easy-to-use thanks to a detailed graphical interface featuring a goniometer displaying the correlation between the input channels and an envelope display showing processing over time. Each processing stage also has a dedicated graphical display with a static curve, in and out VU meters, and more.
Like the other Noise Engineering plugins, both plugins (Polydactyl and Librae) host a complete modulation engine with LFOs and step sequencers managed by an internal modulation matrix. Moreover, modulators have adjustable randomization for easy humanization. Further, they ship with ready-to-use presets to kickstart anyone in need of inspiration.
First Impression
Noise Engineering was previously known for synthesizers and effects. These new plugins also show that they can also offer mixing and mastering plugins with their more experimental DNA.
Noise Engineering Polydactyl and Librae are available now for $49 each. They run as VST, AU, and AAX plugins on macOS (Intel + native Apple Silicon) and Windows. They are also part of the Build Your Own Bundle (buy any three plug-ins and automatically get one for half price).
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