Metric Halo – MELD v4.1.0.264-VST, VST3, AAX x64

For three decades, John Haynes has been a key figure in shaping the sound of modern music at the helm of world-renowned MixStar Studios. Through our landmark collaboration, MELD now provides unprecedented access to his expertise.

We worked directly with John to understand and meticulously model the modern, cutting-edge immersive workflows he’s perfected at the industry’s highest level.

MELD provides a comprehensive signal chain for your ATMOS and stereo mix processing:

A 12-band fully parametric equalizer with analyzer,
compressor,
limiter,
loudness/clipping processor,
tape saturation processor, and MixHead.
All processing blocks are dynamically reconfigurable and grouped into any number of instances.
MELD is the answer to the problem of creating a coherent musical mix in ATMOS. It was created to solve the key issue John Hanes faced while creating immersive ATMOS mixes that matched stereo masters.

In ATMOS immersive mixes, channels are mixed with beds and objects.

A bed is a multichannel bus, or STEM, and can be processed similarly to a stereo bus (provided you have multichannel tools—which MELD provides).

The objects needed for immersion are panned from above by the renderer, meaning they need to be rendered discretely. Simply put, with ATMOS objects, when you process audio, the bus you create is conceptually virtual (as in the Environment Mix).

There is no room in the virtual bus for applying bus processing, which is a key technique for creating proper music mixes for pop and rock.

MELD solves this problem elegantly and quickly. It turns out that addressing these issues in ATMOS mixes also provides significant benefits for stereo mixes.

When you insert MELD into a session, each instance knows about all other instances. You can access any channel directly from the MELD interface—no need to navigate the mix from your host DAW—everything (including solo, mute, metering, and grouping) is at your fingertips within the MELD interface.

MELD includes 26 virtual buses (groups); any instance can be added to a group. All instances in a group use the same processor settings. This allows you to apply the same processing to multiple channels—just as when using a bus. They all apply processing to the bus together. However, each channel remains discretely available for sending to objects or for further processing.

MELD also allows sidechain control of the detector for dynamics processing blocks (compressor and limiter) within a group. This allows assignment of key channels within a group or from any other channel or bus running a MELD instance—all without the need to manage complex routing within the host. Standard routing over shared sidechains allows for bus compression for groups for channels routed to objects.

MELD also offers exciting new tricks unavailable in traditional bus processing workflows: since the channels included in the bus are still discretely accessible after processing, you can adjust levels and EQ compression after the bus—whether you plan to send the channels to objects or simply mix them back into a stereo bus or multichannel platform.

And of course it sounds great!