Created in collaboration with John Hanes of MixStar Studios and Rick Carson of Make Believe, Metric Halo has released MELD, a new plugin that MH says brings five unique innovations to the mixing process that will change how you mix whether you are working on Stereo or Immersive mixes.
Here's what they say:
As your primary channel and bus processing strip (inserted on every channel in your mix), MELD forms the backbone of your virtual console - providing all the core processing you would find in a traditional console work flow, all in one window, with full visibility and navigability for your entire project.
MELD includes:
- 12-band fully parametric EQ with Analyzer.
- Compressor.
- Limiter.
- Loudness/Clipping processor.
- MixHead tape saturation processor.
- Filterable channel list with every channel in the project, with detailed metering (including LUFs and True Peak), comments, bypass, solo, mute and grouping.
The channel list gives you an overview of everything happening in your project and the ability to navigate to any processing channel directly from within the plugin.
MELD provides integrated, delay-compensated dynamics side-chain routing directly inside of the MELD processing engine; this simplifies and speeds up the process of routing signals to channel and bus dynamics and removes the need for you to build complex routing busses to achieve multi-channel dynamics control.
MELD provides integrated grouping allowing for the creation of virtual bus processing, without requiring bus sum points. This functionality is quite profound.
For Immersive mixes that will be delivered to ATMOS, this allows you to do bus processing on object channels just as you would with stereo busses. You can treat a virtual group as a bus, applying the same processing to all the objects in the virtual bus, while still being able to deliver discrete channels or stems to your objects for panning in the renderer.
Even more critically, for the compression and/or limiting of the channels in your virtual bus, you get the gluing effect of bus processing, while maintaining the discrete nature of your objects and beds. This allows you to mix like you are mixing in stereo, but deliver to immersive.
For traditional stereo mixes, this allows you to do bus processing on stems as you would with stereo busses. As with immersive mixing, you can treat a virtual group as a bus, applying the same processing to channels in the virtual bus, while still being able to deliver discrete channels or stems.
Even though your stems will be delivered to a stereo mix, having the capability of delivering to stems while still maintaining the gluing effect of bus compression allows for more creativity, easier and faster delivery of your work product, and substantial flexibility in post-glue compression processing.
MELD grouping instantly applies changes to all instances in the group. This allows you to ensure that grouped channels are processed uniformly, and audition changes across all the channels in the group instantly. While some DAWs have this sort of functionality built-in, MELD provides it for all DAWs.
MELD enables you to arbitrarily reorder the processing blocks in the chain, instantly and without any audible artifacts. This allows you to instantly audition the effects of exchanging Compression and EQ, or Tape Processing and Clipping. Within a single instance, this is very useful.
With MELD, the process order is also grouped within a virtual bus, so the changes you make in one instance of the group are automatically applied to every other instance of the group - allowing you to audition these process order changes on tens or hundreds of channels in real time.
Pricing & Availability
MELD is available now for macOS and Windows in VST2, VST3, AU and AAX plugin formats for the introductory price of $219 (MSRP: $399).
