Processing
Fidena
Audio Processing Studio
Every stage from the first repair to the final limiter, heard as you shape it and rendered exactly as you heard it
In development
- Status
- In development
- Discipline
- Audio Processing Studio
- Editions
- Announced at release
-
Signal chain
Every processor in order, each with its own bypass, presets and Δ to hear only what it changes.
-
Snapshots A to D
Four complete chains, switched while the music plays.
-
Parametric equalizer
Ten bands, up to twenty; each on stereo, left, right, mid or side.
-
Analyzer
The spectrum before and after the equalizer, with hold and weighting.
-
Meters
Input, output and gain reduction.
-
Loudness
Momentary, short-term and integrated loudness, range, true peak, PSR and correlation, by ITU-R BS.1770.
-
Monitoring
Stereo, mono, side, left or right; never rendered.
A mastering and restoration workstation for Windows: a complete signal chain with repair, equalization, dynamics, loudness and delivery, surround beds up to 7.1.4, and VST 3 plug-ins for your DAW.
Fidena is a mastering and restoration workstation. A source passes through one signal chain of repair tools, equalizers, dynamics, effects and mastering stages. Everything you change is heard at once, and a render applies exactly what you heard.
Your source file is never changed. Processing, edits, markers and envelopes are kept in a session and applied when you render, to a stereo master, a set of formats, a whole album or a surround bed.
- Equalizer bands, at most
- 20
- Repair tools
- 7
- Largest channel bed
- 7.1.4
- Chain snapshots, A to D
- 4
- VST 3 plug-ins in Premium
- 20
- 32-bit float renders
- 192 kHz
The Signal Chain
One chain, from the top of the list to the bottom: utility, repair, rebalance, the equalizers, dynamics, effects, stereo processing, hosted plug-ins and the mastering stages that end with the limiter. Several copies of a processor can run, each with its own settings and presets.
Comparisons are fair by design. Match plays the processed signal at the loudness of the source, Δ plays only what one processor changes, and Bypass compares the whole chain with the original.
- Snapshots
- Four complete chains, A to D, switched while the music plays and saved with the session.
- History
- Every change is an undo step; a continuous knob movement is one step, not hundreds.
- Presets
- Factory and your own presets for every processor, and whole-chain presets in the toolbar.
- Monitoring
- Stereo, mono, side, left or right, a reference track and loudness matching. None of it is ever rendered.
- Metering
- Input, output and gain reduction, momentary, short-term and integrated loudness, range, true peak, PSR and correlation, by ITU-R BS.1770.
Equalizer
A parametric equalizer of ten bands, and up to twenty with the extra bands, beside a graphic equalizer, match EQ, resonance suppression and an adaptive equalizer that follows the music as it plays.
- Parametric
- Bell, shelves, cuts from 12 to 48 dB per octave, band pass, notch and tilt; each band on stereo, left, right, mid or side.
- Dynamic bands
- A band can move only when the level in its range passes a threshold, keyed by its own range or another.
- Phase
- Minimum phase without delay, or linear phase with the latency compensated in every render.
- Match EQ
- Learns the tonal balance of the source and of a reference, and applies the difference.
- Resonance
- Finds frequencies that ring out of the surrounding spectrum and lowers them as they appear.
- Adaptive
- Moves the tonal balance toward the track's own balance, a measured style or a reference.
Dynamics
A compressor with VCA, FET and opto characters, a gate and expander, multiband dynamics in two to six bands, a de-esser and a transient shaper.
- Compressor
- Peak, RMS or hybrid detection, knee, hold and lookahead, automatic threshold, release and makeup, and a filtered or external sidechain.
- Multiband
- Two to six bands on stereo, mid or side, with crossovers you drag in the graph, linear phase if you choose.
- De-esser
- Split band or wide band, with a vocal mode that follows a voice.
- Transients
- Strengthens or softens each attack and what follows it, independent of level.
Mastering
The final stages: a true-peak limiter with a loudness target, bass control and a clipper before it, stereo and tone, a four-band imager, and a mastering assistant that measures the file and proposes settings with its reasons.
- Limiter
- Transparent, punchy, aggressive, brickwall and soft clip; lookahead from 1 to 10 ms, true-peak detection, automatic release and stereo link.
- Loudness target
- Match Gain to Target measures the track and sets the input gain so the output lands on the target.
- Imager
- Width in up to four bands, with side recovery for narrowed bands and stereoize for bands that have none.
- Rebalance
- Splits a finished mix into sustained, lead and percussive parts, each with its own level and equalizer.
- Assistant
- Proposes settings for each module from a measurement. Nothing changes until you apply, and applying is one undo step.
Repair
Seven repair tools, each with Listen to hear only what it removes, and a repair assistant that measures clipping, clicks, hum and noise and proposes settings. A single noise on top of the music is taken out in the spectrogram.
- De-clip and de-click
- Rebuilds peaks cut off at full scale; removes clicks and crackle up to a maximum length.
- De-hum and de-noise
- Mains hum at 50 or 60 Hz with its harmonics and drift; steady noise learned from a passage or followed adaptively.
- De-reverb
- Takes the tail of the room out of a recording while the direct sound stays.
- De-plosive and breath control
- Lowers the low-frequency bursts of p and b sounds, and the breaths between phrases.
- Spectral repair
- Select a cough or a chair in the spectrogram by rectangle, lasso or harmonics, then repair, replace, remove or change its gain.
Effects
Reverb with an algorithmic and a convolution engine, delay, modulation, saturation including a tape machine, creative effects, and time and pitch with formant control.
- Reverb
- Room types with size, decay, damping, pre-delay, diffusion and width, freeze, and impulse responses of your own; ducking and a gate on the tail.
- Delay
- Simple, ping-pong, multi-tap, stereo and reverse, free or in note values, with a filter and tape character on the repeats.
- Saturation
- Several characters, a multiband mode in up to four bands with oversampling, and a tape machine with speed and bias.
- Modulation and creative
- Tremolo, vibrato, auto-pan, chorus, phaser and flanger; reverse, stutter, gate, bitcrush, lo-fi, ring modulation and granular.
- Time and pitch
- Pitch and duration changed independently, with formants preserved or shifted on their own.
Plug-ins
Fidena hosts VST 3 effects of other makers before the equalizer and before the limiter, each in a process of its own: if a plug-in crashes, only that plug-in stops, and the audio passes on.
In the other direction, Premium includes Fidena's processors as VST 3 plug-ins for your DAW: one for each module and Fidena Chain, which runs a whole chain in one plug-in. Every setting is automatable and latency is reported to the host.
- Hosting
- Scans the standard VST 3 folder and folders you add; plug-in settings are saved with the chain and the session.
- Isolation
- A crashed plug-in can be restarted with its saved state; a block it does not finish in time passes untouched.
- For your DAW
- Equalizer, Dynamics, Limiter, Reverb, Delay, De-esser, Transients, Saturation, Modulation, Creative FX, Stereo and Tone, Imager, Pitch, Repair, Rebalance, Match EQ, Resonance, Adaptive EQ, Utility and Fidena Chain.
Editing and Sessions
Edits never touch the file on disk. Crops, fades, gain changes, spectral edits and envelopes are kept in an edit list and applied when playing and rendering, with their own undo.
- Source edits
- Crop, delete, silence, insert, gain, normalize, four fade shapes, polarity and DC offset; down to single samples.
- Envelopes
- A gain envelope over the source, and parameter envelopes for the limiter's ceiling, a band's gain, the reverb's mix and many more.
- Markers and regions
- Sample-exact loops, and one render per region.
- Sessions and tabs
- Several files open as tabs, audio copied between them, and a recovery copy refreshed every 30 seconds.
Deliver
Measurement and delivery in one workspace: analysis against delivery targets taken from their primary sources, batch processing and watch folders, render sets, albums and a codec preview that shows what a platform's encoder does to your master.
- Targets
- EBU R 128, ATSC A/85, Free TV Australia OP-59, AES TD1008, Netflix, Spotify and Apple Podcasts, each with the gain the service applies.
- Batch and jobs
- Queues, job files that run again from the application or the command line, and watch folders.
- Render set
- One render written in several formats at once, each tagged in its format's own way.
- Album
- Track order, gaps, crossfades and leveling; one continuous file with a cue sheet, per-track files, or a CD image with a PQ sheet.
- Codec preview
- Encodes the master as each platform does, measures the true peak after the codec, and lets you hear the difference.
- Command line
- fidena-cli renders, measures, runs job files and watches folders, with exit codes for scripts.
Surround and Immersive
Fidena processes channel beds from mono up to 7.1.4. Each processor acts on a choice of the bed's channels, every meter weighs the channels as BS.1770 does, and the bed plays on your loudspeakers or is folded down to what your device has.
- Channel scopes
- All channels, all but the LFE, the front pair, the center, the surrounds or the heights, per processor.
- Monitoring
- The whole bed, a group or a single channel; fold-down by ITU-R BS.775.
- Delivery
- WAV with the channel mask and ADM BWF metadata (ITU-R BS.2076); FLAC, Ogg Vorbis and Opus up to 7.1, AAC up to 5.1.
Who uses Fidena, and for what
- Mastering
- Bring a mix to its delivery loudness and true-peak ceiling, compare it with a reference and check it against the target before it leaves.
- Restoration and spoken word
- Remove clicks, hum, noise, room and breaths from recordings, podcasts and archive material.
- Albums and immersive
- Master a whole album in order, or process and deliver a surround bed up to 7.1.4.
What Fidena reads and writes
- Opens
-
- WAV
- RF64
- BW64
- AIFF
- FLAC
- MP3
- AAC
- M4A
- ALAC
- WMA
- Ogg Vorbis
- Opus
- Renders
-
- WAV
- FLAC
- MP3
- AAC
- Ogg Vorbis
- Album and delivery
-
- Cue sheet
- CD image
- PQ sheet
- ADM BWF
- Reports: HTML, JSON, CSV
What Fidena needs
- Operating system
- Windows 10 or Windows 11, 64-bit
- Runtime
- Included with the installer; nothing else to install
- Audio
- Any output Windows offers through WaveOut, WASAPI shared or exclusive, DirectSound or ASIO
- Internet
- Only to sign in, check a license, sync settings or download updates. Audio is processed on your computer.
Installs for your Windows user account, so no administrator rights are needed. Updates are taken only from the application's official releases and checked against the SHA-256 digest recorded for them.
What does the free edition render?
The equalizer, compressor and gate, reverb, delay, saturation, tremolo, vibrato and pan, reverse and bitcrush, and the standard limiter, in every format up to 48 kHz and 24-bit, one file at a time.
What does Premium add?
Every processor in a render, sample rates above 48 kHz, 32-bit float and loudness targets, batch processing, job files and watch folders, render sets, album rendering, rendering from the command line, equalizer preset sync and the Fidena plug-ins for your DAW.
Can I hear Premium processing in the free edition?
Yes. Every processor can be heard and adjusted in both editions; only the render differs. Before a free render leaves a processor out, Fidena names it and lets you render without it, start the trial or upgrade.
Is Premium a subscription?
No. Premium is bought once and licensed perpetually. Updates within the current major version are included.
On how many computers can I use my license?
A Premium license is for one person and works on up to three computers at the same time. Premium keeps working offline for 30 days at a time. The computers are listed in Studio Hub, where you can release one to use the license on another.
Can I try Premium first?
Yes. Signed in, you can use Premium for 14 days on one computer, without payment details. A trial can be started once per product, account and computer.
