Using Spectral Engine
Automatic, project-wide cross-track de-masking. One instance per track: the instances talk to each other and carve space for one another wherever two instruments collide. No sidechains, no routing.
01 · Install
Get it running
- Unlock the download on the beta page using the password from your invitation email.
- Open the .pkg and follow the steps. It installs both formats: AU into /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components, VST3 into /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3.
- Restart your DAW and rescan plugins if it doesn’t show up right away. Logic will ask to validate the AU the first time; allow it.
02 · Getting Started
The five-minute workflow
- 1
Load it on every track you want it to coordinate
Not just one track: the whole point is that instances talk to each other. Load Spectral Engine on each instrument you want included in the cross-track de-masking.
- 2
Add Spectral Engine Master to your master bus
Optional but recommended: it ties loudness staging across every Spectral Engine track together and true-peak-limits the output.
- 3
Let it listen for a moment
Each instance auto-detects what it’s hearing: the DETECT pill shows its guess and confidence. Wrong guess? Pick the real instrument from the dropdown next to the track name.
- 4
Set Role on tracks that need a fixed priority
Leave it on Auto for most tracks. Put a soloist or lead vocal on Lead so nothing ever carves into it. Put pads and textures on Background so they yield first.
- 5
Play the full mix, not solo
De-masking only makes sense against everything else. Soloing a track to A/B it tells you almost nothing. Listen with the whole arrangement playing.
03 · Controls
What each knob actually does
Every knob. Double-click to reset it to default. Click the number to type an exact value in, Enter sets it, Escape cancels.
How hard this track participates in de-masking overall. Turn it down on a track that should hold its ground more; up on one that should get out of the way.
Sets a fixed, stable priority so auto-detection jitter can’t reshuffle who yields to whom. Lead is protected: everyone yields to it. Background yields the most.
A floor frequency: nothing below it is ever touched. Keeps de-masking away from fundamentals and low-end weight.
Mirror of Protect — frequencies at or above this are never touched, so air and shimmer stay untouched no matter how hard de-masking is working elsewhere.
A ceiling: the deepest any single cut is ever allowed to go, no matter how much conflict is detected. The safety net against over-carving.
Notch width, same convention as any EQ’s Q. Low values cut broad and gentle, high values cut narrow and surgical.
Plays back only what’s being carved out: nothing else. The fastest way to judge whether the de-masking is doing something reasonable.
Toggles how the internal spectrum analysis is time-smoothed: roughly 120ms averaged when off, raw per-frame when on. This isn’t just a display setting — the same analysis drives the actual de-masking decisions, so switching it changes how fast the plugin reacts to transient content, not only how the curve looks. Off is the steadier, more considered read; on is faster and twitchier. Worth A/B-ing on something percussive.
The list on the lower-left of the plugin shows exactly which other tracks this one is currently yielding space to, and by how much. Drag a bar to manually weight how much this track yields to that specific one: 0 to ignore it, up to 2× to yield more than default. RESET clears any manual overrides. An empty list on a Lead track is normal, not a bug: it means nothing is being asked to carve into it. Click the padlock next to a name to lock it into one of the visible slots, regardless of score or rank. SHOW’s count is still a hard limit either way: lock more tracks than SHOW allows and the lowest-priority locked ones won’t display, same as any other row would drop. Locking is per-session and resets when you reload the project.
The PRESET menu (Gentle, Natural, Orchestra, Vocal Space, Dense Mix) sets Strength / Protect / Max Cut / BW as a starting point. Adjust by ear from there.
A note on the “Making Room For” list. It only shows the handful of biggest conflicts right now, filtered through a threshold so it doesn’t flicker during quiet passages. The actual processing underneath runs continuously with almost no threshold at all, so Listen can reveal a small, genuine correction that never gets big enough to make the list. The list answers “who’s the main offender right now” — not “is anything happening at all.”
Making Room For at low Strength. Pulling Strength down doesn’t clear this list, it dims instead. The list is still tracking who’s actually conflicting; Strength only controls how hard the plugin acts on it. A dimmed list means real conflicts are detected, just not being carved yet.
Roles and ties. Two tracks set to the same Role (say, both Lead) don’t yield to each other — they sit at the same priority and stay untouched relative to one another, while everything set lower still yields to both. Useful when more than one element in a mix genuinely needs to stay untouched.
04 · Spectral Engine Master
The master-bus companion
A second, lighter plugin that sits once on your master bus. It reads the loudness every Spectral Engine channel reports, keeps them staged consistently against each other, and true-peak-limits the final output. Load it once per project; it doesn’t need to be on every track.
05 · Good to Know
Before you report something as broken
- De-masking works on the centre of stereo tracks: very wide, decorrelated content is touched less. That’s by design, not a bug.
- Judge everything with the full mix playing. In isolation, de-masked tracks can sound thinner than they do sitting in the arrangement, that’s the point.
- This beta is macOS, Apple Silicon only: no Windows or Pro Tools yet.
06 · Get Help
Found something worth reporting?
Use the feedback form for anything you run into: crashes, artifacts, a DAW it won’t load in, or just general impressions:
Attach the report from ~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports (filenames starting with “Spectral Engine”) along with your DAW, macOS version, and what you were doing right before it happened.