A DAW built for mastering from the ground up, not a studio DAW with a mastering mode bolted on. Load a mix into a room where a serial chain and a parallel path sum sample-aligned, master a whole album without saving alternates by hand, then cut it into gapless per-track files. Every Smash Happy plugin loads straight in.
The mix feeds two paths at once: CHAIN for the serial mastering chain, PARALLEL for the blend. Both land in MASTERED, where the final limiter and metering live. A reference track sits beside them, bypassing everything for an honest A/B.
Every bus is offset by its own plugin latency at schedule time, so a chain with 2,703 samples of delay still lines up with a path that has none. Parallel processing is only worth anything if the two halves arrive together.
Finished masters play and render through a direct path, so whatever is loaded in the room can't colour them by accident. Going through the chain is a deliberate bounce, not the default.
Drop in a commercial record at any sample rate and switch to it instantly. It bypasses the whole graph and is force-muted during renders, so it can never end up in a deliverable.
Queue the whole record, click a song to make it the room, and tweak. Moving to the next one writes whatever was live into that song's own chain variant. No save step, no alternates to name.
Set a baseline and every untouched song plays through it. A marker shows which songs you've customised, and any of them can be reset back to the baseline in one click.
Songs are matched on gated integrated LUFS as they're added, so moving between them is a comparison of tone rather than of loudness. It never overrides a trim you set by hand.
Momentary, short-term and gated integrated LUFS, with K-weighting derived per session rate rather than a hard-coded 48k table, and true peak oversampled 4x. Bounce reports measure the rendered file, not what the meter happened to see during playback.
Anti-phase bass that lifts a cutter out of the lacquer, wide low end that eats side length, and high-frequency energy that burns cutter coils. Metered where it matters, at the output the cutting room receives, or before the master chain to find out who caused it.
A separate vinyl deliverable with a strength control that narrows the low end without touching mid, so the weight stays and only the width goes. It sits ahead of the limiter, and at zero strength it's bit-identical, verified, not assumed.
However far they overlap is how long the equal-power crossfade runs, with both sides reading their own real material. Per-clip fade handles and edge trim for intros and outros, all saved with the session.
Track starts are independent of where songs begin, so track four can start on the downbeat in the middle of a crossfade. Place, drag and rename them on the ruler.
Delivery renders the whole sequence as one continuous file and cuts it at the markers, so every boundary is sample-exact and gapless. Re-rendering each track separately could never guarantee that through a crossfade.
A session captures every chain, every plugin's full state, gains, trims, monitoring and the whole sequence, and references audio in place rather than copying it. Files are tracked so a session still opens after you reorganise a drive, and anything genuinely missing is named rather than silently dropped.
A fader move is one undo step, not the thirty messages it actually emitted. Chain A/B alternates sit alongside it, so you can hold two versions of a chain and switch between them.
Drag to reorder a chain, insert between existing stages, and open any plugin's real editor in the centre panel. The Smash Happy catalogue is there on first launch.
LATHE is in active development and being used on real masters, but it isn't finished and it doesn't have a price yet. It'll be sold on its own and as part of a bundle with the Elemental Mastering Suite. Send us a note and we'll email you when there's something to try.
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