Bring your tracks to life with Mastering The Mix’s Animate plugin

By Ben Rogerson
published

It offers four ways to spice up your sound

Designed to “inject life into your mixes”, Mastering The Mix’s new Animate plugin can be used in four different modes to add colour to your sound.

First up, there’s Expand mode, which promises clean upward expansion. Punch mode is designed for transient enhancement, while Ignite mode lets you dial in harmonic distortion in a dynamic way based on the input signal. You can use it to increase perceived loudness, power and presence, but without adding the ‘pump’ you’d associate with a compressor.

Finally, you can call on the Grow mode, which lets you increase the width of the selected frequenices surpassing the threshold using a psychoacoustic precedence effect.

Additionally, there’s a filter which enables you to isolate which frequencies are processed, and you can adjust the output gain to match the original perceived loudness of your audio before it was processed by Animate. There’s mid/side, left and right functionality, too.

Animate is available now from the Mastering The Mix website priced at $78/£59/€66. You can also download a 15-day trial version, and it’s compatible with both PC and Mac and comes in VST/AU/AAX formats.

Ben Rogerson
Ben Rogerson

I’m the Deputy Editor of MusicRadar, having worked on the site since its launch in 2007. I previously spent eight years working on our sister magazine, Computer Music. I’ve been playing the piano, gigging in bands and failing to finish tracks at home for more than 30 years, 24 of which I’ve also spent writing about music and the ever-changing technology used to make it.