Noiz-Lab

After my book Home Studio Mastering was first published in 2013, I (JD Young) wanted to explore the possibility of developing affordable and user friendly mastering software for musicians with a home studio. I came up with an intuitive 7-step workflow, based on my own real-world experience, incorporating all essential mastering tasks. A method that was easy to learn and fast to execute.

In 2014 I founded Noiz-Lab. I teamed up with my old friend and vst-programmer Remco van der Most, and college musician and GUI-designer Pepijn Oldenburg. Together we started to make the 7-step mastering suite a reality, implementing new structures and algorithms and making the most of recent technological developments in digital signal processing. At the same time – with the guidance of my friend and editor Dennis Kruithof - I started writing the accompanying quick-start manual: a detailed yet concise guide to mastering music with the 7-step suite. The goal: making it possible to master your first song within one or two hours after installing the suite. After the last minute help of UK-based programmer Daz Disley, we finished the beta version of the suite (32-bit vst2 for PC) in September 2014.

To get Noiz-Lab online and spread the word about our 7-step mastering suite, Tim Zuidgeest and Tom van Bommel from Studio ST&T joined the team. They helped us define what Noiz-Lab stands for as a startup company and build our website. We were ready to go online. After releasing the beta version of the plug-ins and manual early 2015, I started looking for a way to make the mastering suite cross platform and multi-format so the suite could be used in any sequencer or audio editor available. I got in contact with Theo Niessink from the Dutch company Martinic, who enthusiastically agreed to help us develop the official full release. After a very succesfull beta testing period - more than 200 people joined our public beta! - we were ready for our official release the 1st of October 2015.

Currently we have released the following versions of our 7-Step Mastering Suite: VST2 and VST3 for PC, and VST2, VST3, and AU for MAC, 32-bit and 64-bit. AAX will follow soon. We have also begun making plans for the future. As a company, we want to be more than just a logo and a webshop – rather, we want to become a community for home studio users who are looking for answers about mastering. I hope to build a personal relationship with many of our users to really understand what kind of mastering plug-ins or other related mastering software home studio users need. So, let us know what kind of mastering related problems you encounter, and what kind of tools you need to solve them.