Audio mastering software that starts from a loudness number
Most audio mastering software hands you a rack of processors and leaves the hard question unanswered: how loud should this be? Evlar Mastering Studio starts from that question. A single dial sets the integrated loudness you want, between −16 LUFS at the quiet end and −8 at the loud end. The full track is analyzed to ITU-R BS.1770, then the app calculates how hard to drive the chain to land on it.
Around the dial sits a short, opinionated chain of four stages (tone curve, glue compressor, stereo width, limiter), each with one job and its own on/off switch. Whatever you change in the chain, the loudness target holds, so you are always comparing tone at the level you will release at.
The app reads your audio and never writes over it. Masters are new files, and the project keeps its own copy of each song, so it opens on another PC even if the originals have moved.
How to master a song in five steps
Bring a mix that already sounds the way you want; mastering finishes a mix, it does not rescue one.
- Choose Add songs… from the File menu or drop the file on the window. Common lossless and lossy formats open, including WAV, FLAC and MP3.
- Turn the dial to your target. Double-click resets it to −14; the arrow keys move half a step and Page Up or Page Down move two.
- Pick the Tone curve for your genre: hip-hop, trap, drill, R&B, pop, lo-fi and more, or flat.
- Press Tab, or click the Before or After meter, to switch between the untouched mix and the master at matched loudness.
- Press Ctrl+E. The song is rendered in full, checked against the target and saved.
LUFS meter, true peak and the release check
The loudness plate is a LUFS meter: during playback it follows the current loudness, and once you stop it shows the integrated figure for the entire track. Two VU meters sit beside it, and small lights show when the glue and limiter are pulling the level down.
Before a master goes out, run the release check. It renders the song exactly as the export will and grades it on six points: hitting your loudness target, true-peak headroom, any clipped samples, the highest sample value, how the mix folds to mono, and whether an MP3 encode overshoots. Every point gets a pass, a warning or a fail, along with the one change that fixes it.
Loudness for streaming, and why the comparison is level-matched
Streaming platforms normalize playback, so a master pushed far past their reference is simply turned down, and loses punch for nothing. The presets on the dial cover the usual targets: −16 LUFS at the quiet end, −14 for the most common streaming reference, −11 for club play and −9 when you want it loud. The limiter's −1 dB ceiling leaves room for the lossy encoders those services use.
Level matching matters for the same reason. Ears mistake louder for better, and that bias is how masters get crushed. Here the untouched mix is turned up or down to match the master before you hear it, so flipping between the two reveals what Tone, Glue and Width did to the sound and nothing else.
Album mastering, artwork and a video for social posts
The Album page sequences a whole release. Add songs, reorder them by right-clicking or with Alt+Up and Alt+Down, and either master every track to one shared loudness or let each keep its own. Export album writes every song numbered and tagged into a folder you pick. The cover designer starts from a template or a photo of yours and writes the finished artwork into each file. For promotion, the app can also render an MP4 that plays the master over its artwork with a moving visualizer, framed 9:16, 1:1 or 16:9.
