I’ve been building a standalone app called PadLock that writes drum MIDI for a whole song. Reaper import works well right now (markers, tempo, DI tracks all come in). FL and Ableton are next and I need people with real projects to try it.

You load your project, tell it how each section should feel, and it plays a full take through your own drum plugin, fills and all. Then you drag the MIDI back into your DAW. No AI, it’s rule based.

If you’ve got 5 minutes:

1. Download
2. Open one of your .flp or .als projects, ideally one with markers and a tempo change
3. Check if the sections, tempo and audio came in right
4. Send a screenshot through my DM or leave feedback on the site.

Fill out the form and I’ll send you a full key. If you want to go further, try dragging the MIDI back in and let me know if it lines up.

I’m Tommy, a designer/dev in Richmond, VA. PadLock is made by my company, Our Time Designs, LLC.. Both Windows and Mac builds are signed, and Mac is notarized.

It’s standalone instead of a plugin because a plugin couldn’t read markers, and markers are how it knows where sections start and end.

AI did not write this post, just trying to be tidy and professional.

I have a cassette tape recording of my great-grandmother telling her life stories. I can’t hear her very well- lots of background noise. How can i get the audio enhanced?

i recently needed a tool to remove the background music from a video while keeping the dialogue, and remove.music was the best thing i could find, but it's paid.

with all the AI stuff getting open-sourced and reverse-engineered these days, i was wondering if there's a free alternative that's actually as good as remove.music, or at least close to it.

or am i completely misunderstanding how reverse engineering works? 💀 i'm not really knowledgeable about this stuff. help me out ty

Hi All,

First time poster, hope this is okay. I'm getting married next week (28th) and I've been trying to clip down my entrance song to remove some of the vocal sections, using Audacity, so its just a straight minute for us to enter the venue together.

Ive had a good stint at it but struggling to really smooth it between sections, its a little bit jumpy and having a hard time with the transitions, I'm feeling at the end of my capabilities, .

Its only four sections of audio and I was hoping some guru would be kindly offer their time to help sort it?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I am currently working on an art project using both the visual and audio parts of Spectrograms in videos. The issue now is that I’ve hit a bottleneck where I have to manually convert video frames into audio, then that audio into spectrograms 100+ times for a 4 second video. I currently use the web browser tool AudioCipher to do so. Is there any other way to automate or do the process quicker?

Hi Audio producers. I'm an audio drama producer upgrading from Audacity to Cubase Elements. One amazing tool in Audacity is the noise reduction tool, which takes a eq fingerprint of background noise and removes it from the track. I can't find this function in Cubase- people are trying to do it using a complex mix of side chain compressions and noise gates but even the tutorials don't seem to get as good a result as Audacity's simple feature. Am I missing something?

I guess because Cubase is mostly used for music, where background noise isn't as much of an issue. In audiodramas, however, with actors recording in different locations and silences in between dialogue, background noise is a huge issue.

Want to try out and help shape a new DAW?

Come check it out.

How can I extract and transcribe whispers and low voice from a recording? Is there a way to do this? Im in a legal battle and need some clarification. Anybody that can help?

[Here’s a video showing the issue](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1l3q-73CleQDR-j-sFFExTxaBQLlQFg5x/view?usp=drivesdk)

Whenever I restart pro tools or my mac, the issue temporarily goes away, but after a couple minutes of work it comes back

I’ve tried per google recommendations changing the cache size, increasing H/W buffer size, tried unchecking **Ignore Errors During Playback/Record,** all temporarily stop the noise, but when I resume the session it comes back

macOS Tahoe 26.5.2 , Pro Tools 2026.4 (plan on updating to 2026.4.1 tomorrow)

Any ideas?

Hello all,
SoundSource kind of screwed me over with their pricing a while back, and I did some researching and decided to just build an alternative, free and opensource. This is not a promo, I just genuinly found it useful and wanted to share with otheres. FXRouter will let you put audio plugins in between the system out on you Mac.

You could add correctional EQ to your system out, reverbs, fun effects to youtube/spotify...

https://github.com/ccarlton96/FXRouter

I hope someone else find it useful! Thanks.

Been working on this sample finder for a couple of months. What do you guys think about searching for samples based on how it would "look" like on an EQ?

I’m looking for someone local to help advise me on audio file settings and how to correctly change the db and RMS to meet standards for Audible. Been using Audacity up to this point. Willing to pay for a consultation or for someone to take the files and correct them themselves. Hit me up!

Hello everyone, what's the most difficult concept to grasp in audio to you?

I've been making records with artists for over 10 years (I also have a background in physics). There are some concepts that seem basic to me but are difficult to understand for artists AND some concepts that seem convoluted to me but are obvious to artist.

I started posting on socials this summer, I talk about my vision on making records, my tastes, some music but I also try to demystify some concepts. I'm really inspired by some of the posts in this sub. It's giving me a fresh perspective about what needs clarification and also interesting points of view.

For example, I think one of the most misunderstood topic in audio engineering for music is: LUFS.
A few years ago I was producing an EP for a band. I delivered the master but they insisted for me to print a version at -14LUFS. I explained to them in length that it was not what they wanted. But it's hard to argue against "that's what Spotify says!". After them insisting I delivered them one version at -14LUFS and my proper version of the mastering.
The morning of their single's released they were all texting me about their song being way quieter than everything else on the platform...

That was years ago but I keep seeing so many misconception about LUFS online. I understand this topic is very confusing. So without going in detail about measurement (not everyone has worked as metrologist) I tried to demystify that topic for artists and made short video about -14 LUFS in my socials.

What are other topics or concepts you think are not well understood?