EQ Studio: Quick Start

1.2.1 September 2026

• No more hollow midrange. The automatic EQ used to line every voice up against its target at a single point, 1 kHz, which left a narrow bump there and a dip around 2 kHz on almost every recording. On a clean, well-balanced microphone that carve was all you heard: a hollow sound with less presence. Voice and target are now lined up across the whole midrange, a typical voice gets no midrange carving at all, and small differences are simply left alone.
• Good microphones keep their presence. The automatic EQ may now take at most 2.5 dB off the top of a recording. Real harshness is still handled by the de-esser.

1.2.0 September 2026

• A smoother, film-like default for every voice. The automatic EQ now aims at a warmer curve, the kind of dialogue tone you hear in a feature film, instead of a bright broadcast sound. It may still cut harshness freely, but it only adds a little presence, almost no extra air, and never adds low end underneath a voice's fundamental. On a wide range of real recordings this roughly halves the top-end lift that made some voices sound harsh or abrasive, for men and women alike. The Bro preset keeps its deliberately big sound.
• Existing projects keep their sound until you press Analyze again. While audio plays, the live re-fitting may ease the tone toward the new curve by up to about a decibel.

1.1.9 September 2026

• Analyze measures your room. De-Reverb, Remove Ambience, Isolate Voice and Noise Cleanup used to be set from the microphone profile alone. Analyze now listens to the recording itself: how the sound decays after each word, how deep and how real the pauses are, and whether the noise it found is actually noise. A dry close mic in a treated room no longer gets reverb removal or gating it never needed; a roomy capture keeps its treatment. Where the evidence is weak, the profile's settings still apply. Long timelines are measured excerpt by excerpt, so the joins between them never count as room sound.
• Safer cleanup. If the quiet moments of a clip are not believable as pure noise (because the voice never stops, or because there is a music bed or tonal hum under it), Noise Cleanup stays at Light and the gates stay gentle instead of chewing into the voice or the music.

1.1.8 September 2026

• A stronger, simpler Analyze. The spectral match is now the single automatic tone corrector, applied at full strength against a target re-tuned on the Auphonic reference corpus. Analyze no longer sets Reduce Boominess, Add Clarity or Add Brightness, and the microphone profiles no longer pre-load them either: they start at zero and are yours to shape by hand. Those three used to be re-derived from the same measurements the match already corrects, and Reduce Boominess sat at its maximum on nearly every real recording. That missing body is what "tinny" reports were hearing.
• Level-invariant analysis. Quiet recordings (wireless mics around -40 LUFS) used to analyze brighter than loud ones. The same clip now gets the same correction at any recording level.
• Mic suggestion reads the sound, not the level. Recording gain no longer changes which profile Analyze suggests.
• Batch Match matches in full. Files matched to a reference now land on the reference's tone instead of halfway there.
• Sessions from earlier versions reopen with Reduce Boominess, Add Clarity and Add Brightness reset to zero (the values Analyze had set under the old rules); every other saved control is kept.

1.1.7 August 2026

• Long multichannel recordings import correctly. Files big enough that their raw audio exceeds about 4 GB (an hour of 6-channel 48 kHz is already there) crashed the app on import. Audio now streams in and out in pieces, so any length works, memory stays low, the progress bar is honest, and Cancel actually cancels mid-file.
• Smoother, cleaner voice at every setting. The analog preamp stage applied far more saturation than intended at low drive amounts, including the factory default, which could put a subtle crushed, gritty edge on loud syllables. It now scales smoothly from fully clean to fully driven. The auto-leveler also settles to the right level almost immediately and no longer boosts the voice so far that the safety limiter has to work constantly.
• Breath Remover and Pop Filter now start Off in every microphone profile, matching the PowerEQ plugin. Both are repair tools with side effects on soft speech; Auto-Fix still suggests the pop filter when it actually detects plosives in your file.

1.1.6 July 2026

• Multichannel, done properly: files with more than two channels (6-channel production WAVs and friends) now import with every channel preserved, and the new channel groups give each channel (or linked stereo pair) its own processing path: its own Analyze, auto-detected mic, controls and Channel EQ. Click a pill or meter bar to choose what you're editing; the waveform and spectrum follow.
• Mute / Solo / pass-through per group: M and S switches under every meter bar (solo is playback-only; mute carries into the export as silence), plus an FX badge per group to pass a channel through completely untouched. Linked channels wear a chain icon, and pills show the file's own track names ("Mix L", "Boom", "Lav 1") when the recorder wrote them.
• MP3 fold-down: MP3 stays stereo, so multichannel timelines fold down by group (pairs keep L/R, mono channels feed both sides) with a clear warning in the export bar. WAV/AIFF/M4A keep every channel.
• Auto mic: leave the mic on Auto and Analyze detects and applies the right profile by itself (per channel group on multichannel files). An explicit pick is never overridden.
• Newest voice engine: the broadcast-warm preset voicings (YouTube carries the full warm, forward curve; the others blend toward it), smoother sentence starts and endings, and an instant level lock so playback starts at the right loudness immediately.
• Fixes: Auto Fix no longer crashes on 96 kHz files; crash reports you send now label which product each attachment belongs to; the meters panel fits any channel count.

1.1.5 July 2026

• Channel EQ, right on the spectrum: the Live Frequency graph is now an EQ editor. Six bands (low cut, low shelf, three peaks, high shelf) with draggable numbered handles; select a peak and drag its width grips apart or together to widen or narrow the band, with the affected frequency range highlighted. Double-click a handle to reset it. The white curve is computed from the exact filters the audio runs: what you draw is what you hear. Bands are saved per clip, in sessions and in your presets, and the sound is untouched until you move a band.
• Volume line on the waveform: drag the yellow line (or its knob) to trim output level, FCP-style; it's the same control as the Volume slider and stays in lockstep. Double-click for 0 dB.
• Smarter waveform: a dimmed indicator follows your cursor to show where a click will put the playhead; click to seek, drag to select a range, exactly as you'd expect.
• New app icon: a native macOS 26 layered icon: full-size in the Dock with the system's glass look (no more shrunken icon on a white plate), and an upgraded classic icon on macOS 13–15.

1.1.4 July 2026

• Adaptive Auto-EQ: Studio now keeps tuning its EQ while audio plays, adapting to each voice and room instead of applying one static curve. It listens first and glides in only once it has settled. A "Tuning EQ" indicator shows while it learns. On by default; toggle it on the Shape tab.
• De-Esser rebuilt: sibilance control now genuinely bites at every recording level, and the new De-Ess Listen toggle plays only what's being removed.
• Calibrated against professional processing: every preset and mic profile was re-tuned on real before/after pairs mastered by a professional reference pipeline; out of the box, loudness and tone land within a fraction of a dB of the pro target.
• Leveler overhauled: gain holds through pauses (no more "volume swelling up" when a speaker resumes), faster attack, better lift for quiet passages, and new Attack, Release and Threshold sliders.
• Your Microphone, redesigned: a clearer full-width mic section, and after Analyze, Studio suggests the matching mic ("Analyze thinks this was recorded with…") with a one-click Use This Mic button.
• Mic picks: retuned Lav and Boom profiles, a new USB Mic pick, and Phone / On-Camera split into Indoor and Outdoor picks.
• Faster exports: channels render in parallel, and long files no longer slow the app down.
• Notifications: a macOS notification fires when an export, batch match or watch-folder file finishes (failures included); click it to reveal the file in Finder. The Delivery check's file name is clickable too.
• Rock-solid long clips: 35-minute-plus files play cleanly while the overview draws, and switching settings during playback no longer distorts or echoes.
• YouTube preset: now brings compression, extra leveling and stronger de-essing.
• Cleaner gaps: the noise-gate no longer flutters at its threshold, removing a subtle digital artifact in pauses.
• Double-click any slider (its name or value) to reset it to default.

1.1.3 July 2026

• Smoother, gentler sound: the automatic leveling, compression, preamp warmth and brightness introduced in 1.1.2 have been re-tuned to be noticeably easier on the ears: audio lands with comfortable headroom under the loudness target instead of pushing against it, and tone shaping uses softer roll-offs. If 1.1.2 felt too hot or dense, this is the fix.
• Crash reporting fixed: if more than one ⚡️EQ product had crash reports on your Mac, the report email could attach only one product's reports and silently drop the other's. Every crashing product now always gets at least one report into the email, and the email lists exactly what's attached.

1.1.2 July 2026

• Auto-Fix button: one click scans for problems (noise, hum, clicks, clipping), applies every suggested repair, and shapes all controls from the analysis. The whole workflow in one press.
• Before / After: press and hold the new capsule next to Play to hear your original; release for the processed sound (the B key still toggles). Looping now wraps gaplessly, and keeps looping while you hold the button.
• Smarter automatic sound, tuned on real recordings: the analyzer now calibrates loudness to your specific clip and gain-stages quiet recordings, so DJI/GoPro/phone tracks land at the preset's target instead of coming out quiet. Auto-shape's brightness and de-esser decisions were re-tuned against a corpus of real mics, rooms and outdoor captures, and a second de-essing stage tames the harsh esses wireless mics push through.
• Mic & Setup picks retuned: Action/Wireless and Phone picks get the full leveling budget, denser compression and real preamp drive; Phone/On-Camera now rides the produced "Studio" voice.
• Watch Folder catch-up: a new toggle processes files already waiting in the folder when watching starts (anything dropped in while the app was closed), skipping files that already have a processed copy.
• Import Preset… and per-preset Share (AirDrop, Messages, Mail) in the preset menu.
• A/B blue dots now survive relaunches and ride saved sessions; sessions also remember your loop and selection. Turning the Auto-shape switch on re-shapes immediately and says so. Reset to Defaults now also resets De-Hum/De-Click/De-Clip. Re-entering your license key on an activated copy says "already activated, you're all set" instead of "invalid".

1.1.1 July 2026

• Watch Folder remembers everything: folders, format and the chosen preset persist across launches, and if the app quits while watching, it resumes automatically on next launch.
• True background operation: watching keeps running at full speed while the app is hidden, minimised or behind other apps.
• Live progress in the header: a "Processing 2 of 5" badge with a per-file progress bar and percentage; click it to open the Watch Folder log.

1.1.0 July 2026

• De-Click, De-Clip and De-Hum: repair digital clicks and mouth ticks, rebuild peaks flattened by recording too hot, and remove 50/60 Hz electrical hum (mains frequency picked automatically). Audio Health now applies these as one-click fixes.
• Fixed: Isolate Voice, Remove Ambience and the De-Reverb tail-ducker previously had little to no effect: all three now work as intended (same detector fix as the Breath Remover).
• MP3 export (256 kbps) everywhere: single files, Batch Match and the Watch Folder. MP3 encoding provided by LAME.
• Delivery check: every export is measured (integrated LUFS, true peak, loudness range) with pass/fail chips for YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify and EBU R128; Batch Match writes a per-file loudness report CSV. 16-bit exports are now dithered.
• Watch Folder: drop files in, processed files come out, using a chosen preset or your current settings.
• Sessions: ⌘S saves the whole timeline (clips + settings); the app auto-saves on quit and offers to restore on launch.
• Analysis chips after import (voice type, loudness, SNR, pitch), a live leveler/limiter gain readout under the meters, hover tooltips on every control, per-slider A/B dots, keyboard shortcuts (Space, B, arrow keys), a Setup tab, and presets that travel to and from the PowerEQ plugin.

1.0.7 July 2026

• New spectral De-Reverb: removes room reverb under and between speech (not just tails), as an Off/Low/Medium/High control.
• Redesigned controls with Shape / Advanced tabs.
• Undo / Redo for every control (⌘Z / ⇧⌘Z).
• The waveform now shows the original as a faint ghost behind the processed audio, so your changes are visible.
• Importing a new file starts fresh instantly; built-in consent-first crash reporting.

1.0.6 July 2026

• Fixed a crash when switching AI Cleanup off (or pressing Stop) during playback.
• Batch Match: input files with identical names no longer overwrite each other's output: duplicates get numbered -matched-2 names.
• The "Check for Updates…" menu item now enables correctly after launch.
• Cancelled batch runs keep their partial progress instead of showing as completed.

1.0.5 June 2026

• License keys are variant-aware: free-version keys stay on the trial; paid keys unlock permanently.

1.0.3 June 2026

• Preset loudness targets aligned to platform standards: YouTube −14 LUFS, Radio DJ −12, Studio −14, Bro −13, Podcast −16 (Apple Podcasts standard).