Trinity | Audio Mastering by Seven Systems Cross-Platform Media Limited

SevenSystems

@McD said:
I took the plunge with a purchase and the User Interface and workflow is beautifully constructed.
I fancy myself as an “optimizer” which is the fancy way of valuing being lazy and always seeking shortcuts.

Trinity is a very pleasurable optimizer for creating multiple mixdowns very quickly so you can use fast A/B comparisons to decide which one to settle on. In a half hour I let it process 6 of my StaffPad creations and generally selected the “stereo widener” preset and uploading a StaffPad Mix generated by @jankun who labors over small details in his work. I was pleasantly pleased with the results.

I can see how someone like @echoopera would be hesitant to turn over the decision making process to
An algorhythm but I suspect there are a lot of “Bark Filter/Magic Death Eye” mixers that might appreciate yet another labor saving app that makes your work sound better and allows you to take all the credit. I wonder if @SevenSystems sneaks a water mark into the files so he can see his Monster’s children in the wild. We would never know unless he sells us the watermark detector app.

Thanks for the feedback! Haha, there's no watermark in the generated files, but I agree that would be a fun exercise! I'll put this on the roadmap for V2 😁😁😁 just have to make sure it somehow survives compression on streaming platforms...

BTW, the "Stereo - *" and "Compression - *" factory presets change ONLY the stereo and compressor settings (more info is available in the in-app help for the presets menu). So you can for example adjust the compressors and normalizers to fit, and then try different stereo settings without affecting the former.

mtenk

People getting upset over $4 while this indie developer is offering a full blown mastering suite for less than what you’d pay for a mediocre breakfast. Good gracious y’all. 🤦🏻‍♂️

It’s got to be incredibly disheartening to put so much time and effort into a seemingly professional product, offer it for a stupid low price, and STILL have people complaining about the cost. I hope we don’t eventually end up in a “this is why we can’t have nice things” situation in the iOS music ecosystem. Rant over. Carry on.

SevenSystems

@mtenk said:
People getting upset over $4 while this indie developer is offering a full blown mastering suite for less than what you’d pay for a mediocre breakfast. Good gracious y’all. 🤦🏻‍♂️

It’s got to be incredibly disheartening to put so much time and effort into a seemingly professional product, offer it for a stupid low price, and STILL have people complaining about the cost. I hope we don’t eventually end up in a “this is why we can’t have nice things” situation in the iOS music ecosystem. Rant over. Carry on.

and @oddSTAR @Endgegner: I do agree that you could argue that I broke my promise of keeping the initial price -- however, I merely meant that the initial price was not any kind of short "Launch discount" or the like. The app has been released more than 3 months ago in an economy with 10% official yearly inflation and 30% "actual" inflation, so it is really not realistic to expect prices to stay the same, especially if they were already very competitive to begin with. I hope you understand.

Also, please be aware that the proceeds from Trinity are lower than what could pay for even a basic living standard in my country by an order of magnitude. It is essentially a hobby project (but with all the obligations of a professional one, mind you)

SevenSystems

@Iskander said:
@SevenSystems Please add an AUv3 slot at the end of the chain. There you could use e.g. TB Morphit to judge the result optimally with a corrected headphone.

Or you could use additional analysis plugins like Youlean Loudness Meter.

This would be a great solution that no other mastering tool offers standalone.

It's a good idea. However, integration of any kind of AUv3 functionality would be very hard to do given Trinity's architecture, but it's firmly planned for a possible V2 😊

Gavinski

@SevenSystems said:

@mtenk said:
People getting upset over $4 while this indie developer is offering a full blown mastering suite for less than what you’d pay for a mediocre breakfast. Good gracious y’all. 🤦🏻‍♂️

It’s got to be incredibly disheartening to put so much time and effort into a seemingly professional product, offer it for a stupid low price, and STILL have people complaining about the cost. I hope we don’t eventually end up in a “this is why we can’t have nice things” situation in the iOS music ecosystem. Rant over. Carry on.

and @oddSTAR @Endgegner: I do agree that you could argue that I broke my promise of keeping the initial price -- however, I merely meant that the initial price was not any kind of short "Launch discount" or the like. The app has been released more than 3 months ago in an economy with 10% official yearly inflation and 30% "actual" inflation, so it is really not realistic to expect prices to stay the same, especially if they were already very competitive to begin with. I hope you understand.

Also, please be aware that the proceeds from Trinity are lower than what could pay for even a basic living standard in my country by an order of magnitude. It is essentially a hobby project (but with all the obligations of a professional one, mind you)

Totally agree. This was priced way too low to begin with. It's still a total bargain at the current price, especially compared to many of the new desktop ports coming in at $20+

HotStrange

@SevenSystems said:

@HotStrange said:

@SevenSystems said:

@HotStrange said:
Was using the app earlier on a track I posted on creations. It really is a great mastering app. Good work @SevenSystems

Thanks, much appreciated! 😌

One question. I tried loading a video file straight from “media library”, and I could never get it to load or even bring up the photos/videos app. I waited about 5-6 mins and eventually ended up converting it to a wav file in Wavebox and uploading it from the files app. Did I do something wrong?

Sorry, automatically extracting and re-multiplexing audio from video files is not supported. What you've done is the best you could do.

No need to apologize I just wanted to confirm! Still love the app

HotStrange

@Gavinski said:

@SevenSystems said:

@mtenk said:
People getting upset over $4 while this indie developer is offering a full blown mastering suite for less than what you’d pay for a mediocre breakfast. Good gracious y’all. 🤦🏻‍♂️

It’s got to be incredibly disheartening to put so much time and effort into a seemingly professional product, offer it for a stupid low price, and STILL have people complaining about the cost. I hope we don’t eventually end up in a “this is why we can’t have nice things” situation in the iOS music ecosystem. Rant over. Carry on.

and @oddSTAR @Endgegner: I do agree that you could argue that I broke my promise of keeping the initial price -- however, I merely meant that the initial price was not any kind of short "Launch discount" or the like. The app has been released more than 3 months ago in an economy with 10% official yearly inflation and 30% "actual" inflation, so it is really not realistic to expect prices to stay the same, especially if they were already very competitive to begin with. I hope you understand.

Also, please be aware that the proceeds from Trinity are lower than what could pay for even a basic living standard in my country by an order of magnitude. It is essentially a hobby project (but with all the obligations of a professional one, mind you)

Totally agree. This was priced way too low to begin with. It's still a total bargain at the current price, especially compared to many of the new desktop ports coming in at $20+

Agreed! Obviously I’m glad I bought it when I did, but I’m enjoying the app so much that I’d probably pay double if I didn’t already own it.

FastGhost

Yeah, got to agree that this app is still way underpriced for the results it gives.

Having only just got to grips with a workflow of mastering inside the DAW with Grand Finale 2 and a bunch of other stuff on my master bus it’s kinda weird going back to mastering separately to the mix so count me among the voices wanting to be able to run it inside a DAW. It’s a huge time saver.

HotStrange

@FastGhost said:
Yeah, got to agree that this app is still way underpriced for the results it gives.

Having only just got to grips with a workflow of mastering inside the DAW with Grand Finale 2 and a bunch of other stuff on my master bus it’s kinda weird going back to mastering separately to the mix so count me among the voices wanting to be able to run it inside a DAW. It’s a huge time saver.

Maybe it’s just because I’ve never tried it that way, but mastering outside the DAW has always sounded/been optimal for me. I like to separate the 2 process entirely, otherwise I get way to caught up in post processing.

SevenSystems

I used to do mastering while mixing too, I think it's helpful if you don't have a good feel for the mix in general (yet), so you can keep re-adjusting levels. I think finally after 25 years, I'm now almost confident enough in my mixes that one or two mixdown "attempts" are enough 😄 the good thing about Trinity is that its multiband dynamics are very forgiving to suboptimal levels in the mix... together with the EQs and the saturators, you can fix lots of issues that the mix might have (although technically, it'd be better to fix them in the mix. But I'm lazy!)

McD

@SevenSystems said:
But I'm lazy!

I think it’s worth mentioning that a programmer will spend a massive amount of time and effort to make a tool to optimize a process they repeat a lot: mastering audio in this case.

Joni Mitchell’s shares some details about vinyl recordings that I had never heard before:

The record company wanted to get 40-45 minutes of audio onto a vinyl record to have around 10
4 minute tracks suitable for radio play. To do this they would insure that the bass end of the spectrum was suppressed to insure physical width availability to hit that 40+ minute target. Joni would tell her engineer Henry Luey that she wanted more resonant drums with extra tone and more bass in the mix but he explained that a rich low end steals real estate from the vinyl. So, the drums were padded up to make them short transients and the bass strings would be dead to be more thumpy.

Stevie Wonder starting use a Moog for his bass and the solution was to ship a double album to have a reasonable number of songs.

The issue today is insuring that the streaming listener doesn’t have to change the volume settings between various artists so everything is mastered either by the artist’s engineers or the streaming service to solve for this user requirement.

The aesthetics of rich bass is often left to the listener to select the best speakers/headphones to provide that mix.

Life and art is riddled with trade offs.

Regarding pricing strategies I think that’s a control the developer can control as a dialog with potential users. When you buy an app is a huge factor on the price you pay. Finding out an app costs more now than it did yesterday is always an incentive to wait for another opportunity to get the lower price.

In the comments here it is clear that the work put into this app has cannot be justified by the market feedback on the product. I think it’s great when developers shred these private details and it helps me feel better about missing the discounted price as a way of holding up our end of the social contract with our beloved developer community. We want them to thrive and not regret working for us only to find we are not going to support their work.

oddSTAR

@mtenk @McD I think it's pretty unnecessary for either of you to jump on me or the person who agreed with me for commenting about this price change. You’re 100% right that $4 isn't that big of a deal to most people and my point was not at all to complain about the new price which is still more than fair--in fact, I think I was pretty damn nice about it and went out of my way to include positive comments about the app and the developer whom I do hold in high esteem. If I needed it, I’d likely buy it right now but I don't so for $10 it will have to wait, that's all. I wasn't trying to give the dev a hard time about it, and I’m not even upset. Again, I don't need it right now--I was just going to buy it because it was cheap and I like to support iOS devs whenever I can. His reasons for changing the price are the same ones I have for setting a relatively low threshold of ~$5 for an impulse buy and I do understand and respect them.

My purpose in commenting at all was two-fold:
1) To ask if a bundle for Xequence 2 and Trinity was a possibility, and...
2) To advise the dev that is it generally a poor PR move to increase a price by ~66% from what was explicitly stated as "final" only recently without an announcement or addendum to earlier statements. I say that because I care, not because I'm "righteously indignant."

Now it is known and he's stated his reasons so it's a moot point, only made to try and help avoid misunderstandings in the future. No hard feelings.

I’m grateful to you @SevenSystems for making great tools at affordable prices, am sad to hear it didn’t sell well at even the generous initial price, and wish you much success in the future. Also, if you believe my prior comments might do more harm than good, I’ll delete every one of them, but as I've already said--I'm sure this is a great tool at a very good price.

HotStrange

@SevenSystems said:
I used to do mastering while mixing too, I think it's helpful if you don't have a good feel for the mix in general (yet), so you can keep re-adjusting levels. I think finally after 25 years, I'm now almost confident enough in my mixes that one or two mixdown "attempts" are enough 😄 the good thing about Trinity is that its multiband dynamics are very forgiving to suboptimal levels in the mix... together with the EQs and the saturators, you can fix lots of issues that the mix might have (although technically, it'd be better to fix them in the mix. But I'm lazy!)

Luckily for me I make more experimental music so clipping and limiting is the key. I don’t necessarily need good mixes 😂 though this app is very great for both. It’s definitely my go to now. I think it’s good for learning mastering too at its basic levels. Just due to the interface and feedback it gives.

McD

@oddSTAR said:
@mtenk @McD I think it's pretty unnecessary for either of you to jump on me or the person who agreed with me for commenting about this price change.

I edited out the offensive comment. Sorry for being a judgemental dick. I’ll try and do better. If I can show empathy for the developer then I can show empathy for someone that is upset about a sudden increase in price when the discount was stated to be a new price.

SevenSystems

@HotStrange said:

@SevenSystems said:
I used to do mastering while mixing too, I think it's helpful if you don't have a good feel for the mix in general (yet), so you can keep re-adjusting levels. I think finally after 25 years, I'm now almost confident enough in my mixes that one or two mixdown "attempts" are enough 😄 the good thing about Trinity is that its multiband dynamics are very forgiving to suboptimal levels in the mix... together with the EQs and the saturators, you can fix lots of issues that the mix might have (although technically, it'd be better to fix them in the mix. But I'm lazy!)

Luckily for me I make more experimental music so clipping and limiting is the key. I don’t necessarily need good mixes 😂 though this app is very great for both. It’s definitely my go to now. I think it’s good for learning mastering too at its basic levels. Just due to the interface and feedback it gives.

Sounds good! If you like to learn about mastering, you might also want to look at the official Trinity guide (you probably already have), which gives a good general overview about the multiband mastering process:

https://www.seven.systems/trinity/en/guide/

HotStrange

@SevenSystems said:

@HotStrange said:

@SevenSystems said:
I used to do mastering while mixing too, I think it's helpful if you don't have a good feel for the mix in general (yet), so you can keep re-adjusting levels. I think finally after 25 years, I'm now almost confident enough in my mixes that one or two mixdown "attempts" are enough 😄 the good thing about Trinity is that its multiband dynamics are very forgiving to suboptimal levels in the mix... together with the EQs and the saturators, you can fix lots of issues that the mix might have (although technically, it'd be better to fix them in the mix. But I'm lazy!)

Luckily for me I make more experimental music so clipping and limiting is the key. I don’t necessarily need good mixes 😂 though this app is very great for both. It’s definitely my go to now. I think it’s good for learning mastering too at its basic levels. Just due to the interface and feedback it gives.

Sounds good! If you like to learn about mastering, you might also want to look at the official Trinity guide (you probably already have), which gives a good general overview about the multiband mastering process:

https://www.seven.systems/trinity/en/guide/

Sweet thanks! I actually haven’t read the entire guide yet and this look pretty thorough. Definitely gonna be reading through it 🙏

FastGhost

@SevenSystems is there a limit on how long the exported track can be? I’ve just done a remix for someone and mastered it in Trinity (and it sounds bloody great by the way), but the exported result is missing the last 30 seconds of the track every time I export. The song is 6:34, the output from Trinity is 6:01

SevenSystems

@FastGhost said:
@SevenSystems is there a limit on how long the exported track can be? I’ve just done a remix for someone and mastered it in Trinity (and it sounds bloody great by the way), but the exported result is missing the last 30 seconds of the track every time I export. The song is 6:34, the output from Trinity is 6:01

Hey. That sounds like a bug, 6:34 definitely should be no problem at all.

Could you possibly share the raw mix file with me via email (address is on the Trinity website under "Support") so I can have a look and issue a fix?

Thanks!

NB: If you need a quick fix for your situation: Maybe just append 30 or 40 seconds or so of silence to the input track, and then trim off the end of the exported file?

FastGhost

Thanks chief, will do. I’ll try it from Trinity on my Mac as well, this was on my iPad.

Darkstring

Ah poop, I didn’t get it earlier. Maybe another time then, as it does look good. AUM and Cubasis both still work a treat though.

[Deleted User]

The user and all related content has been deleted.

FastGhost

@SevenSystems Right, I've tracked it down to a reproducible set of steps, both on Mac and iPad -

• my mix wav is 16 bit, 48khz
• I load it up in Trinity and change the project sample rate to 48 from 44
• export and the last 30 seconds or so are missing
• if I switch back to 44khz it exports in full

If I switch the project in Trinity to 48khz before importing the mix then it exports just fine, so a slight edge case bug with an easy workaround, but probs good for you to know about it regardless.

SevenSystems

@FastGhost said:
@SevenSystems Right, I've tracked it down to a reproducible set of steps, both on Mac and iPad -

• my mix wav is 16 bit, 48khz
• I load it up in Trinity and change the project sample rate to 48 from 44
• export and the last 30 seconds or so are missing
• if I switch back to 44khz it exports in full

If I switch the project in Trinity to 48khz before importing the mix then it exports just fine, so a slight edge case bug with an easy workaround, but probs good for you to know about it regardless.

Thank you, that is highly appreciated. It's not often users report bugs in such a detailed and complete manner!

Yes it's important to set the project sample rate before loading the files. I'll see what can be done to fix this or at least give the user a better warning / explanation.

Thanks again for bringing it to my attention! ✅

FastGhost

I’m a coder, I’ve seen my fair share of terrible bug reports! Let me also just repeat, the results from this app are astonishingly good. Thank you.

SevenSystems

@FastGhost said:
I’m a coder, I’ve seen my fair share of terrible bug reports! Let me also just repeat, the results from this app are astonishingly good. Thank you.

Ah great to know. In all honesty, I was expecting these kinds of bugs with changing project sample rates, this part of the app is a bit sloppy (but all other parts are amazing 😁, as you kindly mentioned!). I'm currently working on an update to MusicFolder 2, but Trinity will be next, given I can work (bit hit and miss these days...)

HotStrange

Shout out to @SevenSystems for being such a cool responsive Dev! Makes me even happier to be an owner of Trinity and Xequence.

SevenSystems

@HotStrange said:
Shout out to @SevenSystems for being such a cool responsive Dev! Makes me even happier to be an owner of Trinity and Xequence.

Thanks for your custom!

GLacey

@FastGhost said:
@SevenSystems Right, I've tracked it down to a reproducible set of steps, both on Mac and iPad -

• my mix wav is 16 bit, 48khz
• I load it up in Trinity and change the project sample rate to 48 from 44
• export and the last 30 seconds or so are missing
• if I switch back to 44khz it exports in full

If I switch the project in Trinity to 48khz before importing the mix then it exports just fine, so a slight edge case bug with an easy workaround, but probs good for you to know about it regardless.

48 kHz is 9% more than 44 kHz
6:34 is also 9% more than 6:01

I'm not sure it's just a coincidence...

SevenSystems

@FastGhost @GLacey thanks again, the issue has been found and an update has just been sent to Apple for approval 👍

Neo8

@SevenSystems said:

@Neo8 said:
I bought Trinity when it released in January. Used it on some tracks and love the versatility and sound characteristics it has. Definitely worth the purchase. There are more all in one mastering apps available that I also own, but they have less options and with one of them I am really questioning the coding of the developer (I will not name the app and developer), because it’s audio DSP engine tend to crackle and is noisy (both inside the app and after exporting). Trinity works for me and I’m curious what Seven Systems is coming up with in the future for iPad applications. Cheers.

Thanks for the compliments. There's a full roadmap for a Trinity V2 layed out (and it would be awesome!), but unless sales of V1 increase by at least a factor of 5 or I finally win the lottery after trying on and off for decades, it's unlikely to happen 😢

I can share the App Store link on my socials. Maybe it will help for more sales. I would be sad if Trinity V2 never comes to fruition 😢