T Racks 3 Screenshot

One of the most important, yet often overlooked, elements of a professional recording is mastering. Mastering isn’t a part of mixing, it is the final stage before audio is duplicated, where the fidelity (punch, clarity and volume) are added to the track. Mastering is one of the separators between demo and pro recordings, and high quality mastering can literally separate a hit from just another song. IK Multimedia’s latest installment of the T-Racks Mastering Suite takes the art of digital mastering to a whole new level, bringing advanced signal processing and fidelity to the masses.. With T-Racks 3, anyone can get music mastered at the level of a professional mastering lab.

I’ve been a T-Racks user for years, and I recently had the opportunity to work with the new T-Racks 3 software. I thought T-Racks 3 was going to be a rehashed version of software I loved. I couldn’t have been farther from the truth. The interactivity, new plug ins, and sound quality blew my mind. I expected to see a familiar piece of software, with 4 signal processors popping up on the screen. When I opened the program and saw the 12 configurable slots for the signal chain, my first thought was “is this for real?” This didn’t even look like the program I have used for years. Once I started testing the program out on a final mix, I found it to be easy and fun to use. Within two hours I had three distinct masters to choose from, and each of them sounded sonically equal to almost any major label release I have heard.

T-Racks 3 is available for both Mac and Windows, and the plug ins can be loaded into almost any audio program as well as used as standalone software. The program is beautiful and the plug ins look real (and gorgeous). All the modules can be turned on and off individually (allowing you to actually hear the difference each plug-in makes to your master), and the 12 slots are configurable in a variety of ways. There is even a bypass button that lets you compare your original (plug in free) mix with the mastered version.

As if all that isn’t enough, the five new processors (available in the Deluxe version) are recreations of some of the most powerful and well-known studio equipment in history, including limiters, compressors, and equalizers. T-Racks brings the quality, equipment, and results of some of the finest mastering studios on the planet into your home studio, and the program clocks in at under $400. If you want your tracks to sound professionally mastered, and have the highest professional fidelity, then T-Racks 3 may be the best choice for your home studio.

The major labels are very outspoken about the evils of piracy, and aggressively pursue those who chose to download music and not pay for it. That being the case, there is great ironyin the fact that up to 47% of Sony-BMG’s software is pirated.

Recently, a tech support call for a program called Ideal Migration (a Windows server management tool) was made by a Sony BMG employee, and the product code given was pirated.

The ensuing drama included a seizure of some of Sony-BMG’s assets.? Paul Henry, The CEO of the maker of the software, was quoted as saying “I think piracy is linked to the policy of a company. If the employee has the necessary funding to buy the software? he needs,? he will. If this is not the case, he will find alternative ways, as the work must be done in one way or another.”

Bottom Line: A company that is using pirated software should not be surprised when their products are pirated.