The Official TrueHear Studio Suite User Manual.

Welcome to the “I Stood Next to a China Cymbal in 1998” Club

Let’s be honest about how we got here. Nobody develops a 35 dB notch at 4,000 Hz from knitting sweaters or birdwatching. You earned your audiogram the honorable way: standing stage-left three feet from a drummer’s Zildjian Oriental China trash cymbal in a concrete basement club in 2002, leaning your left ear into a dimed 100-watt Marshall JCM800 to check if a tube was microphonic, or spending eight hours looping an 808 kick and snare on studio headphones at 94 dB SPL.

Somewhere along the way, six real-world studio mixing traps crept into your workflow—and standard FFT spectrum analyzers (which only show raw decibels, not how your cochlea perceives them) completely fail to protect you from any of them:

How TrueHear Studio Suite Solves All Six Traps Together

Unlike generic FFT spectrum analyzers—which treat a +4 dB bump at 3.8 kHz the same whether you have flat 18-year-old ears or a 35 dB noise notch—every plugin in the TrueHear Studio Suite reads your personal 10-band Left/Right audiogram in real time from ~/Library/Application Support/TrueHearSuite/ear_profile.json. It weights every harshness alert, cross-bus masking calculation, WDRC expansion curve, and native Logic Pro preset specifically around the frequencies your ears under-report.

The 5-Minute Logic Pro Session Routing Setup

Before touching a single EQ knob, install the suite and set up your Logic Pro mixing template so TrueHear can monitor your individual instrument stems, analyze your master bus, translate high frequencies on demand, and apply safe monitor compensation at the very end of the signal chain.

Step-by-Step Logic Pro Template Checklist

1. Create Your Instrument Summing Track Stacks (Up to 12 Buses): Select your tracks in Logic Pro, press Cmd + Shift + D, and create Summing Stacks starting with the 7 Core Band Buses: 1. Vox (Lead Vocal), 2. Drums, 3. Bass, 4. Left Guitar, 5. Right Guitar, 6. Backing Vocal, and 7. Keys. Have horns, acoustic guitar, synth pads, strings, pedal steel, or percussion? Assign them to Customizable Band Slots 8–12!
2. 1-Second Batch Insert Across All 12 Aux Buses + Automatic Bus Name Pickup:
   • Open Logic Pro’s Mixer (press X), Shift-click all 12 of your instrument Aux channel strips at once, and insert Audio Units → TrueHear → TrueHear Multi-Bus Inspector (aufx ThIn StTl) on a single slot (right after Logic’s stock Channel EQ).
   • Logic Pro instantiates TrueHearInspector across all 12 Aux buses simultaneously! Each instance queries CoreAudio’s kAudioUnitProperty_ContextName / JUCE’s updateTrackProperties() to automatically read the Logic Pro Aux channel strip name ("Vox", "Drums", "Bass", "Left Guitar", "Right Guitar", "BGV", "Keys", or any custom band bus like "Pedal Steel", "Horns", or "808 Sub"), assigns the matching acoustic role profile, and claims an open slot (01–12) in InterInstanceStemRegistry with zero slot collisions!
   • Click the ⚡ Deploy to All Busses button in the MultiBusInspector header at any time to broadcast a mesh-wide Auto-Discover & Sync Host Names refresh and export a complete 12-Bus Logic Pro Channel Strip & Preset Kit (01-VOX through 12-PRC) directly to ~/Music/Audio Music Apps/Plug-In Settings/TrueHearInspector/AutoDeploy-12Bus/ and ~/Music/Audio Music Apps/Channel Strip Settings/Bus/TrueHear 12-Bus Suite/.
3. Populate Your Stereo Out Master Channel Strip (In Exact Order):
   • Insert 1 (Optional): Your favorite mix-bus compressor, tape saturator, or mastering limiter.
   • Insert 2: TrueHear Multi-Bus Inspector (aufx ThIn StTl) set to Master Inspector mode. It automatically discovers all active band satellites (up to 12 buses, with 16-bus expansion ready) over POSIX shared memory!
   • Insert 3: MasterDensity (aufx MsDn StTl) for 12-zone Mid/Side congestion analysis and loudness-matched Reference Track A/B comparison.
   • Insert 4: TrueHear EarProfile & Guard (aufx ThEp StTl) for your 10-band audiogram, Over-Compensation Guard, and Session Ear Fatigue (TTS) tracking.
   • Insert 5: TrueHear HF Microscope (aufx ThMc StTl) for octave-down high-frequency auditioning and 4-band Left/Right symmetry checks.
   • Insert 6 (VERY LAST INSERT ON STEREO OUT): TrueHear SafeMonitor (aufx ThSm StTl).

TrueHear EarProfile & Over-Compensation Guard

TrueHear EarProfile & Guard is both the brain of the entire plugin suite and your personal studio bodyguard against “4 PM Mix Syndrome.” When you adjust a single node on its 10-band clinical audiogram, the plugin atomically writes your curve to ~/Library/Application Support/TrueHearSuite/ear_profile.json and broadcasts a macOS Darwin Distributed Notification (com.truehear.suite.profileChanged) so every open plugin and the standalone app update within microseconds—with zero audio-thread locks or dropouts.

How to Dial In Your Ear Profile (4 Easy Ways)

1. 1-Click Import From Apple AirPods Pro 2 (HealthKit) or Mimi Hearing Test (v2.0): Already took the clinical hearing test on your iPhone/iPad with AirPods Pro 2 (Apple Health) or the Mimi Hearing Test app? Click Import AirPods / Mimi in the top bar and select your Apple Health audiogram export (export.xml / HKAudiogramSample XML, PDF, or JSON) or Mimi export (.json, .csv, .xml). TrueHear automatically maps your Left/Right dB HL thresholds onto the 10-band studio grid, extrapolates the 12 kHz and 16 kHz studio air bands from your 4–8 kHz roll-off slope, auto-fits any 3–6 kHz noise notch, and syncs all 5 plugins instantly!
2. Start From a Clinical Archetype Preset: Use the Profile Preset dropdown to select Normal Flat, Mild Roll-Off, Noise Notch 4kHz (the classic rock guitarist/drummer dip), Age Slope, Asymmetric Dip, or Tinnitus.
3. Copy Your Audiologist’s Sheet (10 ISO Bands): Select Left Ear (Blue), Right Ear (Coral), or Link Both, and drag the 10 standard ISO nodes (250, 500, 1k, 2k, 3k, 4k, 6k, 8k, 12k, 16k Hz) between 0.0 dB HL (top) and 60.0 dB HL (bottom). Shape between-band contours using the parametric Roll-Off Knee, Roll-Off Slope, and Notch Frequency / Depth / Q controls.
4. Built-In Reference Tone & v2.0 3-Minute Warble Wizard: Toggle Calibration Tone (-60 to -12 dBFS). Whenever you click or drag an ISO node on the graph, the internal sine oscillator automatically snaps to that band’s exact ISO frequency so you can verify Left/Right loudness parity and pinpoint your Tinnitus frequency. (In v2.0, the full “AirPods Pro Style” 3-Minute Studio Wizard automates this right on your studio headphones/monitors with pulsed FM warble tones and a Tone-in-Pink-Noise cochlear synaptopathy check!)

Inside the Over-Compensation Guard Math

Why does the Guard catch harsh mixes that look “fine” on a regular analyzer? Because GuardEngine combines three psychoacoustic measurements across 5 studio trap zones (Sub Rumble 20–50 Hz, Mud 200–450 Hz, Bite 2.5–5.0 kHz, Sibilance 6.0–8.5 kHz, and Air 10–18 kHz):

• Target Excess (dB): Measures how far each zone’s 150 ms leaky RMS energy exceeds a natural -4.5 dB/octave studio reference slope anchored to your mix’s midrange.
• Personal Blind-Spot Severity (0.0 to 1.0): Queries SharedEarProfile::getBlindSpotSeverity01(centerHz) and getTinnitusProximity01(centerHz). If a frequency sits inside your 4 kHz notch or within 0.35 octaves of your tinnitus tone, the Guard knows you are flying blind there.
• Crest-Factor Harshness Multiplier (×1.0 to ×1.4): A dynamic snare hit with a 14 dB peak-to-RMS crest factor at 3.8 kHz sounds punchy. A heavily clipped synth or over-compressed vocal wall with a 5.5 dB crest factor at 3.8 kHz sounds like a dentist’s drill. When crest factor drops below 9 dB in the Bite, Sibilance, or Air zones, GuardEngine scales the risk score up by up to 1.4×.

High-Frequency Octave-Down Microscope & L/R Symmetry Compass

Here is the fundamental paradox of high-frequency hearing loss: if your ears roll off by 35 dB above 8 kHz, boosting 12 kHz by +15 dB on your monitor bus still won’t give you clean resolution—it just drives your tweeters and remaining hair cells into distortion. Instead of brute-force volume, TrueHear HF Microscope uses a sub-11 ms time-domain pitch translator to temporarily shift the entire 6.0–16.0 kHz octave down by 1 octave (into 3.0–8.0 kHz) or 2 octaves (into 1.5–4.0 kHz) right into your healthiest midrange!

How the Sub-11 ms Dual-Head Hann Pitch Shifter Works

Phase-vocoder FFT pitch shifters smear transients over 40–80 ms, turning crisp hi-hats and vocal “ess” transients into watery mush. MicroscopeEngine instead uses a 4th-order Linkwitz-Riley (24 dB/oct) highpass pre-filter (cascaded 2nd-order Butterworth pairs) plus a 16.5 kHz ultrasonic lowpass filter to cleanly isolate the high frequencies, feeding a 4,096-sample circular ring buffer read by two 180°-out-of-phase rotating heads with a 512-sample (10.6 ms @ 48 kHz) raised-cosine Hann window and 4-point Hermite cubic interpolation.

• Solo Highs Mode: Mutes the dry low/midrange completely so you hear only the transposed 6–16 kHz top end living at 3–8 kHz. Vocal spit, mouth clicks, bad de-esser release times, and harsh cymbal fizz jump out like they’re under a studio magnifying glass.
• Mix Blend Mode: Blends the dry full-range mix with 50% of the octave-down high-frequency layer so you can set vocal de-esser thresholds and hi-hat fader levels in musical context.
• v1.5 Specialized Lenses (Transient, Reverb Tail & Sub-Bass +1 Oct):
  • Delta Transient Solo: Isolates fast- minus slow-envelope attack differentials so engineers with hidden hearing loss (cochlear synaptopathy) can hear exact compressor attack punch.
  • Reverb Tail Magnifier: Suppresses transients and lifts sustained decay tails by +12 dB so you can hear exactly when a vocal plate or hall reverb muddies the next lyric phrase.
  • Sub-Bass +1 Octave Lens (20–80 Hz → 40–160 Hz): Shifts sub-bass 1 octave up so engineers mixing on small nearfields or headphones can immediately hear 808 pitch tuning and kick/bass phase cancellation.

The 4-Band L/R Symmetry Compass & “The Stage-Left Snare Test”

If your left ear has 10 dB more loss at 3 kHz than your right ear, a perfectly centered lead vocal will sound to you like it’s panned slightly to the right. Before you touch your vocal pan pot or stereo bus EQ, look at the 4-Band L/R Symmetry Compass:

• Band 1 — Sub-Bass (20–160 Hz): Kick and sub-bass anchor. Should sit within ±0.5 dB of dead center.
• Band 2 — Low-Mid (160–800 Hz): Snare fundamental, bass harmonics, and guitar body warmth.
• Band 3 — Vocal Center (800–4,000 Hz): The decisive phantom center anchor. If this bar reads 0.0 dB and Vocal Center Coherence (Mid / (Mid + Side)) is above 75%, your vocal is dead center—even if your left ear swears it’s leaning right!
• Band 4 — Highs / Air (4,000–18,000 Hz): Cymbals, overheads, and stereo air spread.
• The 1-Click Swap L/R Trick: Click Swap L/R while listening to your vocal and snare. If the vocal suddenly feels like it jumped to the same ear, your mix is balanced and your ears are asymmetric. If the tilt flips to the opposite side, the mix itself is lopsided!

TrueHear SafeMonitor Compensation, WDRC & BounceGuard™

While EarProfile & Guard and HF Microscope help you diagnose problems, sometimes you just want to sit back, play the track, and enjoy a natural, balanced monitor feed tailored to your ears—without risking further hearing damage or printing your monitor EQ onto the master. That is the job of TrueHear SafeMonitor.

Why Clinical Audiology Uses the “Half-Gain Rule” (Not 1:1 Boost)

If you have a 30 dB HL dip at 4 kHz, a naive engineer might think, “I’ll just put a +30 dB boost at 4 kHz on my speakers!” Do that once and you will either blow your monitor tweeters into orbit or trigger immediate cochlear pain. Why? Because of Loudness Recruitment: when outer hair cells in the cochlea are damaged, quiet sounds (-45 dBFS) are inaudible, but as sound pressure rises toward -12 dBFS, the inner hair cells fire all at once—meaning loud sounds are perceived at nearly the same loudness (and pain threshold) as a healthy ear!

SafeMonitorEngine protects your ears in three ways:

1. Audiological Half-Gain Scaling: At the default Assist Strength of 60%, SafeMonitor applies Lybarger’s clinical Half-Gain rule—restoring clarity and presence with a gentle, musical biquad peaking bell at your exact notch frequency plus a smooth high shelf above your roll-off knee.
2. Hard Safety Ceiling (+10.5 dB) & Soft Clipper: Even if you dial in a 60 dB HL audiogram loss and crank Assist Strength to 100%, SafeMonitor never allows total combined filter gain to exceed your Max Boost Ceiling (capped at +10.5 dB), followed by a smooth std::tanh saturation ceiling at -0.3 dBFS.
3. v1.5 Dynamic Recruitment WDRC Lens (NAL-NL2 / CAM2): Instead of applying static linear EQ boost at all volumes, the multiband Wide Dynamic Range Compression (WDRC) lens provides full half-gain lift on quiet studio details (-65 to -35 dBFS—reverb tails, vocal breaths, ghost notes, fade-outs) and smoothly compresses its corrective boost down to 0.0 dB at -12 dBFS so loud snare hits and vocal peaks never make you wince!

MasterDensity Analyzer & Loudness-Matched Reference A/B

When your ears have broadened auditory filters (cochlear smearing) or a high-frequency roll-off, two things happen on the master bus: low-mid mud (200–500 Hz) piles up into a thick wall of wool, and you lose track of how your mix’s tonal balance compares to commercial releases. MasterDensity turns spectral congestion, Mid/Side width, and commercial reference track comparison into an unmistakable visual map.

The 12 Psychoacoustic Studio Mixing Zones

Instead of forcing you to mentally translate raw Hertz numbers while mixing, DensityAnalysisEngine partitions the audio spectrum into the 12 exact functional zones mixing engineers care about:

Loudness-Matched Reference Track A/B (Why Louder Always Lies)

If you drag a mastered commercial WAV or MP3 reference track into your DAW at -8.5 LUFS and compare it to your unmastered live mix at -16.0 LUFS, the commercial track is 7.5 dB louder—which triggers the Fletcher-Munson equal-loudness effect and tricks your brain into thinking your mix has no bass and no air.

When you click Load Ref in MasterDensity, ReferenceTrackManager decodes the file in a background thread, computes its ITU-R BS.1770-4 K-weighted integrated loudness, extracts its 12-zone energy/crest profile and 128-column spectrum (drawn as a dashed Amber target curve), and automatically attenuates or boosts the reference stream (clamped within ±18 dB) during Ref A/B Audition so the reference plays at the exact same RMS/LUFS loudness as your live mix!

12-Bus Instrument Inspector & Native Logic Pro + UAD Presets

Even minor hearing loss widens the cochlea’s critical auditory filters (Equivalent Rectangular Bandwidths, or ERBs). When two instruments occupy the same Bark critical band—like Bass and Left Guitar at 350 Hz (Bark 4), or Right Guitar and Lead Vocals at 3,400 Hz (Bark 17)—a healthy ear can still separate them by temporal fine structure, whereas an ear with widened cochlear filters hears a single blurred smear.

TrueHear Multi-Bus Inspector solves inter-bus masking across up to 12 stereo instrument buses simultaneously (with 16-bus shared-memory architecture headroom for Phase 9 / v2.1). Out of the box, it starts pre-configured for a real band’s core 7 buses—1. Vox (Lead Vocal), 2. Drums, 3. Bass, 4. Left Guitar, 5. Right Guitar, 6. Backing Vocal, and 7. Keys—while Slots 8–12 can be customized to any instrumentation your band has (e.g., Acoustic Guitar, Synths / Pads, Horns / Brass, Strings / Fiddle, Pedal Steel, or Percussion / FX)—and writes the exact corrective EQ preset directly into Logic Pro’s native plugins.

🥁 Drums First Always (`Stage 0: 12-Mic Drum Kit Mode` → Swappable Drum Bus Glue Compressor → Full Band Mix)

Every veteran mixer knows the golden rule: Drums first, always. Then everything else. Before you touch guitars, keys, or vocals, flip TrueHear Inspector into 🥁 Drum Kit Mode (Drums First), Shift-click all 12 drum mic tracks inside your Logic Pro Drum Summing Stack, and insert TrueHear Inspector once:

• 🥁 Deploy to Drums + Flexible Fuzzy Drum Track Name Matcher (matchDrumTrackNameToSlot): Clicking 🥁 Deploy to Drums reads every drum track’s name from Logic Pro (kAudioUnitProperty_ContextName / updateTrackProperties) using a flexible fuzzy/tokenized parser that understands any studio naming style—whether you name tracks "Inner Kick" / "Kick In" / "Kik 1" / "Beta 91", "Outer Kick" / "Kick Out" / "Sub Kick", "Snare Top" / "Snr Top" / "SD 57", "Snare Bottom" / "Snr Bot" / "Snare Wires", "Tom 1" / "Rack 1" / "Hi Tom", "Tom 2" / "Mid Tom", "High Hat" / "Hi-Hat" / "HH", "Stereo Overheads" / "OH L/R", "Floor Tom" / "FT", "Sound City" / "Virtual Room" / "Drum Room", "Crush" / "Smash", or "Drum Bus". Even if two tracks are just named "Kick" and "Kick 2" (or "Snare" and "Snare 2"), collision-aware fallback automatically assigns the first to 01 Inner Kick (03 Snare Top) and the second to 02 Outer Kick (04 Snare Bottom)!
• 8 Default Core Dry Drum Channels + Virtual Room Aux Inside Drum Sub-Mix (DrumKitSubMix): Defaults to the exact 8 core dry drum channels: 01 Inner Kick (KIN) • 02 Outer Kick (KOT) • 03 Snare Top (SNT) • 04 Snare Bottom (SNB) • 05 Tom 1 (TM1) • 06 Tom 2 (TM2) • 07 High Hat (HHT) • 08 Stereo Overheads (OVH) — plus Drum Sub-Mix expansion slots 09–12: 09 Tom 3 / Floor Tom (FLT) • 10 Parallel Crush (CRS) • 11 Virtual Room Aux (VRM — e.g., UAD Sound City Studios) • 12 Master Drum Bus (DRM)! Because the 8 dry drum channels (`01–08`) are phase-locked and EQ’d first, they send a clean, punchy signal into 11 Virtual Room Aux (UAD Sound City Studios) before summing into 12 Master Drum Bus glue!
• 1-Click 🔄 Recalculate Room Mics Button (recalculateVirtualRoomBus() — Right in the Drum Toolbar): Whenever you move the virtual room microphones inside UAD Sound City Studios (changing distance from the kit, swapping virtual mic models like C12 ↔ RCA 44 ↔ U47, or adjusting chamber damping/curtains) during drum mixing, clicking 🔄 Recalculate Room Mics flushes only the Virtual Room bus’s spectral/phase buffers—keeping your 8 dry drum mic fixes (`01–08`) 100% untouched—and immediately re-measures:
  • 1. Virtual Room ↔ 08 Stereo Overheads / 03 Snare Top Arrival Lag (Δt ms) & Comb-Filtering Risk: Detects whether moving the Sound City virtual mics closer created phase cancellation against your dry overheads or snare.
  • 2. Dynamic Abbey Road / Sound City Drum Room EQ Re-Solve: Adapts the 180–210 Hz Sub-Boom HPF (protecting dry kick punch), dynamic 260–340 Hz low-mid room-mud carve, 2.2 kHz vocal-pocket carve, and 7.5 kHz Silk LPF (so 08 Stereo Overheads own the cymbal air) to the new virtual mic placement before feeding into 12 Master Drum Bus glue!
• Coupled 2-Mic Drum Pair Solvers (01 Inner Kick ↔ 02 Outer Kick & 03 Snare Top ↔ 04 Snare Bottom): Clicking the 01 KIN ↔ 02 KOT or 03 SNT ↔ 04 SNB cell in the matrix (or stepping through Stage 0.1 and Stage 0.2) solves specifically for those two mics as a coupled acoustic pair:
  • Inner Kick ↔ Outer Kick Solver: Checks 45–160 Hz phase correlation (r) and acoustic arrival offset (Δt ms) between the inside beater mic and outside resonant head mic, and builds a complementary 2-mic split (Outer Kick owns 52 Hz sub + -3.5 dB @ 85 Hz pocket + 3.5 kHz LPF; Inner Kick gets 55 Hz HPF + +2.5 dB @ 80 Hz punch + 3.8 kHz click).
  • Snare Top ↔ Snare Bottom Solver: Catches the #1 studio drum mistake—an un-flipped 04 Snare Bottom mic (r < -0.20 at 195 Hz, where top and bottom diaphragms face opposite directions and cancel out 6 dB of snare body!)—gives a 1-click Ø Flip Polarity button, and high-passes Snare Bottom at 180 Hz so Snare Top owns the 195 Hz meat while Snare Bottom owns the 5.2 kHz wire sizzle.
• Close-Mic ↔ 08 Stereo Overheads Phase & Comb-Filtering Detector: Continuously measures real-time cross-correlation (r ∈ [-1, +1]) and time-of-flight delay (Δt ms, e.g., Snare Top arrives 3.1 ms [149 samples] before Stereo Overheads) between every close drum mic (Inner/Outer Kick, Snare Top, Tom 1, Tom 2, High Hat) and 08 Stereo Overheads, flagging polarity inversions and comb-filtering cancellations that engineers with high-frequency hearing loss might miss!
• Why “Drums First” Saves SNHL Engineers from Cymbal-Bleed & Cardboard Mud (deployDrumKitSubMixChain()): Close drum mics (Snare Top, Toms) contain -10 to -15 dB of hi-hat/cymbal bleed at 3.5–7 kHz. If you have a 4 kHz noise notch and boost upper-mid attack on a snare or tom, you inadvertently pull up abrasive cymbal wash! TrueHear solves this by deploying split-band DeEsser 2 (6.0–6.8 kHz) on Snare Top and Toms + a 3.5 kHz LPF on Outer Kick + -3.5 dB @ 3.8 kHz blind-spot cuts on Stereo Overheads, while carving 265–340 Hz cardboard shell buildup across all drums so upward cochlear masking doesn’t veil the vocal pocket.
• “Zero Loudness Deception” Crest-Factor Squash Guard (verifyDrumBusCompressorHealth): Continuously monitors your Master Drum Bus dynamics (healthy drum window: 10.0–16.5 dB crest factor) and triggers an alert if a swapped UAD/Waves compressor drops the Drum Bus Crest Factor below 8.5 dB—preventing fast-attack presets from squashing snare snap and pulling up harsh cymbal wash!

5-Compressor UAD / Waves End-of-Bus Swap Table (`DrumBusCompressorSwapSpec`)

At the end of your Master Drum Bus (12 DRM), TrueHear automatically configures Logic Pro’s stock Compressor so your kit hits with cohesive studio glue right out of the box—and gives you exact, loudness-matched parameter targets so you can swap in your favorite UAD or Waves bus compressor in seconds:

🪄 The Optional 6-Step “Add-a-Bus” Mix Builder Wizard (`🪄 Start Guided Mix Wizard`)

Free-Mix Mode by Default, Guided Wizard on Demand: By default, TrueHear Inspector runs in standard Free-Mix 12-Bus Matrix Mode—all 12 buses play normally and you can click any clash cell or bus in any order you like. The 🪄 Guided “Add-a-Bus” Mix Wizard is 100% optional: you kick it off whenever you want by clicking the 🪄 Start Guided Mix Wizard button in the top toolbar (and you can return to Free-Mix mode at any time with ✕ Exit Wizard).

When you start a mix with all 12 buses blaring at once, widened cochlear filters (ERB smearing) and upward masking make it nearly impossible to tell where the mud or harshness is coming from. Clicking 🪄 Start Guided Mix Wizard turns TrueHear Inspector into a Progressive “Add-a-Bus” Mix Builder:

When you launch Step 1, TrueHear automatically mutes the rest of the band (progressiveActiveBusMask) so you only hear 🥁 Drums (`02 DRM`). Each time you click ✓ Lock & Add Next Bus →, TrueHear automatically unmutes the next bus group into the mix, measures how the newly added bus interacts with the foundation you already locked in, lets you click 🔊 Preview Fix, and writes the Logic Pro .pst/.aupreset as you build the record layer by layer:

1. Step 1 — 🥁 Setup Drums First (8 Dry Drum Mics + 11 Virtual Room Aux [UAD Sound City] → 12 Master Drum Bus Soloed): All non-drum buses are auto-muted. Dials in per-mic dry drum EQ (`01–08`), 2-mic Kick/Snare phase, cymbal-bleed de-essing (DeEsser 2), your 11 Virtual Room Aux (UAD Sound City Studios) Abbey Road/Sound City room contour (with 1-click 🔄 Recalculate Room Mics whenever you move virtual mics in Sound City), and the end-of-chain Master Drum Bus Glue Compressor (with UAD / Waves swap targets and ≥8.5 dB crest-factor guard).
2. Step 2 — 🎸 Add Bass Bus (02 Drums + 03 Bass | 20–160 Hz): Unmutes 03 Bass into your glued 02 Drums and locks in the 45–120 Hz Kick/Bass pocket using dynamic spectral ducking (Multipressor), stopping low-end energy from triggering upward cochlear masking across the midrange.
3. Step 3 — ⚡ Add Left & Right Guitars (+ 04 GTL & 05 GTR | 160–500 Hz): Unmutes stereo guitars into Drums + Bass and applies static surgical cuts (Channel EQ) to clear 220–400 Hz cabinet boxiness so broadened auditory filters (ERB smearing) don’t cloud the mix.
4. Step 4 — 🎹 Add Keys, Acoustic & Synths (+ 07 KEY, 08 ACG, 09 SYN | 200 Hz–2.5 kHz): Unmutes keys, acoustic guitars, and synth pads into the rhythm bed and separates them cleanly from the electric guitars.
5. Step 5 — 🎤 Add Lead Vocal (+ 01 VOX — Right After Rhythm Beds! | 800 Hz–4.5 kHz): Unmutes 01 Vox on top of the locked rhythm track and carves a dynamic 1.5–4 kHz Multipressor pocket in the Guitars & Keys so 01 Vox owns the center without boosting into your 4 kHz hearing notch.
6. Step 6 — 🎶 Add Backing Vocals, Horns, Strings & FX Last (+ 06 BGV & 10–12 | 500 Hz–16 kHz): Unmutes 06 BGV and auxiliary ear-candy after the Lead Vocal is sitting on the throne—tucking harmonies neatly behind 01 Vox and resolving 4.5–16 kHz cymbal-vs-vocal sibilance clashes with DeEsser 2! (Plus a 1-click header toggle between “Pro Order (Vox Before BGV/Sweeteners)” and “Vocals Last”!)

At each Wizard step (Step 1 of N), TrueHear auto-solos the two clashing buses (🎧 Auto-Solo Pair), explains why this pair comes next, lets you click 🔊 Preview Fix to audition the EQ carve in-place, and provides a 1-click ✓ Apply Fix & Next Bus → button that writes the Logic Pro .pst/.aupreset and advances straight to the next bus!

Even better, the Wizard enforces three clinical psychoacoustic safeguards so your mix stays natural, punchy, and musical:

• 1. Cascade Upward-Masking Relief (cascadeReliefDb): Applying a Stage 1 (20–160 Hz) or Stage 2 (160–500 Hz mud) cut automatically recalculates upward cochlear masking into the midrange (1.5–4 kHz) and reduces downstream Stage 3–4 vocal-pocket cuts so you never over-cut!
• 2. Stage-Aware Dynamic vs. Static Selection: Uses Dynamic Spectral Ducking (Multipressor) for Stage 1 Kick/Bass (45–120 Hz) and Stage 3 Lead Vocal Pockets (800 Hz–4.5 kHz so guitars/keys stay 100% lush when the vocalist isn’t singing), Static Surgical Cuts (Channel EQ) for Stage 2 Low-Mid Mud (160–500 Hz), and Dynamic De-Essing (DeEsser 2) for Stage 5 Sibilance/Air (4.5–16 kHz).
• 3. “Swiss-Cheese Mix” Prevention Guard (Max 3 Cuts / -9.5 dB Budget Per Bus): Consolidates nearby cuts within <0.35 octaves and caps any single bus at 3 EQ cuts max—automatically pivoting any 4th clash on that bus to a -1.5 to -2.5 dB broadband fader or stereo pan trim instead of carving a 4th hole!

Automatic Logic Pro Bus Name Pickup & ⚡ Deploy to All Busses

Nobody wants to manually configure 12 plugin dropdowns when inspiration is striking. TrueHearInspector combines Apple’s Audio Unit host context property with lock-free slot negotiation so you can wire an entire 12-bus band mix in one second:

• Automatic Logic Pro Bus Name Pickup (kAudioUnitProperty_ContextName / updateTrackProperties): The moment TrueHearInspector is inserted on a Logic Pro Aux channel strip, it reads the Aux bus name directly from Logic Pro ("Vox", "Drums", "Bass", "Left Guitar", "Right Guitar", "BGV", "Keys", or any custom band bus like "Pedal Steel", "Horns", "Fiddle", or "808 Sub"), matches its acoustic role profile and hierarchy priority, and atomically claims an open slot (01–12) in InterInstanceStemRegistry with zero slot collisions.
• 1-Second Shift-Click Batch Insert in Logic’s Mixer: Press X in Logic Pro, Shift-click all 12 Aux buses at once, and insert TrueHearInspector on a single slot. Logic Pro instantiates all 12 satellites simultaneously—each one reads its own Aux strip name, negotiates slots 01–12 without colliding, and lights up the ✓ HOST SYNC: 12 LOGIC AUXES AUTO-NAMED badge in the Master Inspector!
• The ⚡ Deploy to All Busses Header Button: Clicking ⚡ Deploy to All Busses in the top toolbar performs two studio-saving actions at once:
  1. Broadcasts a mesh-wide Auto-Discover & Sync Host Names command across all active instances so any renamed Aux strips in Logic Pro immediately update across all open plugin windows and the standalone app.
  2. Writes a complete 12-Bus Logic Pro Channel Strip & Preset Kit (01-VOX through 12-PRC, named after your active 12 buses) directly to ~/Music/Audio Music Apps/Plug-In Settings/TrueHearInspector/AutoDeploy-12Bus/ and ~/Music/Audio Music Apps/Channel Strip Settings/Bus/TrueHear 12-Bus Suite/.
• 16-Bus Architecture Headroom (Phase 9 / v2.1): The underlying POSIX shared-memory segment (/TrueHear_StemMesh_v2) pre-allocates 64-byte cache-line-aligned ring slots for up to 16 stereo buses, allowing seamless expansion to 16 simultaneous buses for double drum kits, horn sections, or large live multitracks without breaking session compatibility.

Zero-Sidechain POSIX Shared Memory Architecture (/TrueHear_StemMesh_v2)

In Logic Pro, Audio Unit plugins only allow a single sidechain input—meaning traditional multi-track analyzers force you into a spaghetti nightmare of Aux sends. InterInstanceStemRegistry eliminates sidechain routing completely:

• Each Stem Satellite instance pushes stereo 32-bit float audio blocks into a lock-free, 64-byte cache-line-aligned Single-Producer Single-Consumer (SPSC) ring buffer (65,536 samples per channel, magic header 0x5448534D 'THSM') in POSIX shared memory, tagged with the DAW playhead’s sample timestamp.
• The Master Inspector instance on your Stereo Out reads all 12 active band buses with sample-accurate playhead alignment, allowing you to click S on Bass + Drums, compare Left Guitar vs. Right Guitar, or solo Right Guitar + Lead Vocal and engage Clash Bandpass Solo to hear only the colliding 3,400 Hz Bark band!

Native Logic Pro (.pst / .aupreset) & Universal Audio (UAD Binary .fxp) Preset Generation

When MultiBusClashEngine and FixSuggestionEngine identify a masking collision (or when MasterDensity calculates a Reference Track delta curve, or DrumKitSubMix solves your 12-mic drum kit), you don’t have to manually copy frequencies, gains, Q values, or compressor ratios into your plugins. LogicPresetWriter serializes both native Apple Logic Pro presets and native Universal Audio (UAD) binary .fxp presets directly to disk:

• Bit-Accurate 220-Byte Logic Binary .pst (GAMETSPP): Installed directly to ~/Music/Audio Music Apps/Plug-In Settings/Channel EQ/ (with 32-byte header + 47 little-endian 32-bit floats and automatic hyperbolic arcsine Q → octave bandwidth conversion: BW = 2.88539 × asinh(1 / 2Q)).
• CoreAudio XML .aupreset: Installed to ~/Library/Audio/Presets/Apple/Channel EQ/ (and copyable to clipboard).
• v1.5 Multi-Plugin Native Logic Pro Preset Support: Beyond 8-band Channel EQ (chqe), the exporter maps dynamic and mastering fixes to Logic Pro’s Linear Phase EQ (lpeq, phase-coherent master bus cuts), Compressor (dyna, VCA/FET punch for synaptopathy transient recovery), DeEsser 2 (des2, split-band relative sibilance taming in your tinnitus zone), and Multipressor (mpr4, 4-band dynamic upward/downward Bark un-masking).
• Native Universal Audio (UAD) Binary .fxp Exporter (LogicPresetWriter::writeUadFxpPreset — CcnK / FPCh): Writes real, bit-accurate UAD binary chunk presets directly into /Library/Application Support/Universal Audio/Presets/ (with big-endian CcnK / FPCh header + little-endian 0.0–1.0 normalized float parameter payload + XML metadata footer) so they appear immediately inside your UAD plugin preset browser for:
  • UAD SSL G Bus Compressor (fxID: YBAU, 11 params): TrueHear Master Drum Bus Glue (4:1 ratio, 30 ms Attack, 100 ms / Auto Release, 90 Hz SC HPF, ~3.0 dB GR).
  • UAD API 2500 (fxID: UBAU, 18 params): TrueHear Drum Bus Thrust & Punch (3:1–4:1, 30 ms Attack, 0.1s Release, Thrust: Med, Tone: New).
  • UAD Empirical Labs Distressor (fxID: 4CAU, 11 params): TrueHear Parallel Crush (Slot 10) (6:1, Atk: 4–5 [~30ms], Rel: 2 [~90ms], Detector: HP, Audio Mode: Dist 2 tube warmth that rounds off harsh 4 kHz cymbal transients).
  • UAD UA 1176LN / Rev A (fxID: 40AU / V9AU, 7/6 params): TrueHear Fast Snare/Room Catcher (4:1 or All-Buttons, Atk: 1 Slowest, Rel: 7 Fastest 50ms, Mix: 35–50% parallel blend).
  • UAD Pultec EQP-1A (fxID: NAAU, 10 params): TrueHear Coupled Kick Low-End Trick (simultaneous 60 Hz Boost + Atten pocket so kick sub weight never clouds bass fundamentals).
  • UAD Neve 1073 (fxID: ZAAU, 16 params) & UAD SSL E Channel Strip (fxID: WBAU, 43 params): Per-channel 01 Inner Kick, 02 Outer Kick, 03 Snare Top, 08 Stereo Overheads, and 11 Virtual Room (Sound City) console contour presets!

Unified Standalone App (TrueHearSuiteApp.app) & Real-World Mixing Cheat Sheet

Don’t have Logic Pro open? Launch TrueHearSuiteApp.app on macOS to access all 5 tools in a single Apple-clean desktop window with a top segmented tab bar (1. Ear Profile & Guard, 2. HF Microscope & Compass, 3. Safe Monitor, 4. Master Density, 5. Multi-Bus Inspector).

• 3 Flexible Audio Input Sources: Switch effortlessly between Hardware Input (route CoreAudio loopback / BlackHole / interface inputs to analyze Spotify, Apple Music, or any DAW), Master Mix File (load WAV/AIFF/FLAC/MP3/M4A bounces with transport loop & scrub bar), and 12-Bus Multi-Track Stem Player (load up to 12 discrete instrument stem files—starting with Vox, Drums, Bass, Left Guitar, Right Guitar, Backing Vocal, and Keys—to practice clash detection and generate Logic presets offline).
• Built-In Mix Fault Training Simulators: Use the Ear Profile & Guard and Multi-Bus tabs to train your ears on classic blind-spot traps before starting a mix session.

The Veteran Mixer’s “Symptom → Tool → Fix” Cheat Sheet

Troubleshooting & Verification Checklist

• Logic Pro Doesn’t Show the Plugins After Build/Install: Ensure the 5 .component bundles (MasterDensity.component, TrueHearEarProfile.component, TrueHearHFMicroscope.component, TrueHearSafeMonitor.component, TrueHearMultiBusInspector.component) are copied into ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components/. Run killall -9 AudioComponentRegistrar in Terminal or open Logic Pro’s Plug-In Manager and click Reset & Rescan Selection.
• Command-Line Audio Unit Validation: You can verify any plugin directly via Apple’s official validator:

  /usr/bin/auval -v aufx MsDn StTl
  /usr/bin/auval -v aufx ThEp StTl
  /usr/bin/auval -v aufx ThMc StTl
  /usr/bin/auval -v aufx ThSm StTl
  /usr/bin/auval -v aufx ThIn StTl

• Multi-Bus Inspector Shows “0/12 Satellites Online”: Verify that the instances on your instrument buses have Instance Mode set to Stem Satellite (not Master Inspector), that each is assigned to its own Band Slot (1–12: Vox, Drums, Bass, Left Guitar, Right Guitar, Backing Vocal, Keys, or Custom 8–12), and that Logic Pro playback is running (Logic suspends AU processBlock on silent/idle tracks until audio flows).
• Where Are My Exported Logic Pro Presets Saved? Binary .pst files are written atomically to ~/Music/Audio Music Apps/Plug-In Settings/Channel EQ/ and XML .aupreset files are written to ~/Library/Audio/Presets/Apple/Channel EQ/. They appear immediately inside Logic Pro’s Channel EQ preset dropdown menu under User Presets.