New Music Gear Monday: Mastering The Mix Expose 2 Quality Control App

It’s pretty common for a musician or artist to finish a mix and not know how it’s going to play against other songs in the real world. Yes, there are plugins that allow you to do a listening comparison, but most don’t give you much more information than level differences. That’s where Expose 2 from Mastering The Mix comes in. The updated version 2 offers new features that make it easier than ever to see and hear just how your mix will fair out there in general distribution.

First of all, Expose is a stand-alone app instead of a plugin. All you need to do is drop in the tracks and you’ll get instant feedback on the new interface about any quality control issues that exist. Then you need to select the intended distribution method, like Spotify, Club, CD, etc. You can then either load in a reference track to compare to, or select one of the many tonal presets.

At that point Expose will provide a section that gives you detailed information about the loudness, peaks, stereo/phase information, and dynamic range of your audio, and turn red if there’s a problem. In the display it will also find those problem sections of the song and mark them in red so you can zero in on the cause more precisely.

After that, there’s a new Compare EQ section that shows how your average tonal balance compares to your imported reference track, or against the genre-based preset that you selected. Mastering The Mix says that these presets were created using the sonic profiles from commercially successful tracks so you can get a real-world analysis of this critical parameter. This will allow you to check that your music isn’t too muddy, dull, thin, or harsh before you decide to release it.

Finally, there’s a new Loudness Match section that normalizes the playback of all tracks in EXPOSE using a LUFS algorithm so you can do a real comparison without being biased because of level changes.

As I said before, Expose 2 is a stand-alone application and it’s available for both Mac and PC. It’s only $42 with a free trail and a 30 day money-back guarantee.

You can find out more here, or check out the video below for more details.

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