DJ mix mastering for tracks and full sets. Stays on your machine.

A mix that sounds great in your room can fall apart everywhere else - thin on AirPods, boomy in a car, swallowed on a club system. Every playback chain emphasizes different things, and your setup is only one of them.

Mastering narrows that gap. It balances the spectrum so the track translates across systems, sets loudness and true-peak so it survives streaming normalization, and catches problems - harshness, rumble, clipping - that you stop hearing after hours in the same room.

An engineer brings fresh ears, a tuned room, and judgement calls specific to your record - plus mix feedback and revisions if something upstream needs fixing.

Acetate is an opinionated chain that knows what house, techno, and the more unconventional ends of electronic music are supposed to sound like. It analyzes your track and applies the moves a genre-literate engineer would make - including cleaning up needle drops - instantly and consistently, for a one-time $63. For demos, promos, and self-releases it gets you most of the way there. For the record that matters most, hire an engineer - I still do.

To become the mastering tool electronic producers reach for by default - the way certain indie plugins became fixtures of a genre. Acetate is a genre-literate mastering chain for house, techno, and unconventional electronic music, built on the principle that restraint is a feature: the best move is often no move at all.

Every stage shows what it did and why - and critically, what it declined to do. That's aimed at the usual complaint about automated mastering, which is having to undo half of what it did.

At the level of parts, it isn't. Every mastering chain is EQ, compression, saturation and limiting - including the one a human engineer builds. Anyone telling you their processing is made of something else is selling you something.

The difference is what decides the settings, and what it tells you afterwards. Acetate measures the track and shows you every move before it makes one, with the reason attached. It declines more than it applies: if a band already sits where it should, it says so and leaves it alone. No model, no training data, nothing uploaded - the same file gives the same result every time, and you can read why.

That's aimed squarely at the usual complaint about automated mastering, which is having to undo half of what it did.

No, and neither can anything else. If an MP3 encoder threw the top end away, it is gone - no tool recovers information that is not in the file. Anything claiming to "upscale" audio is either guessing or generating, and neither is mastering.

Acetate balances and levels what is actually there. Feed it your mixdown, or a needle drop you made yourself from a record you own, at the highest resolution you have. Not a stream download.

Acetate runs on macOS (Apple Silicon) and Windows (x64, experimental). Download it free.

Each install gets 1 free master, no signup, and unlimited in-app preview. Further exports need a license; Acetate is one-time $63, lifetime - not a subscription.

No. Acetate is signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so it opens like any other Mac app - download, drag to Applications, double-click. No Terminal commands, no security warnings.

The Windows build is experimental: not signed with a Windows code-signing certificate yet, and tested on fewer machines than the macOS build. SmartScreen blocks the installer on first launch with a blue "Windows protected your PC" dialog. To open it:

1. Click More info on the SmartScreen dialog.
2. Click the Run anyway button that appears.

You only need to do this once per install. After that, Acetate launches normally from the Start menu or desktop. If anything misbehaves on Windows, tell us at hello@acetate.lol - reports from real machines are what moves it out of experimental.

WAV or AIFF at 16, 24, or 32-bit float, FLAC, or MP3. Dither applies automatically when you pick 16-bit. Loudness normalize can be turned off in Settings if you want the file left exactly as the chain rendered it.

Yes. From the Done screen, Acetate opens a two-step publish flow: pick your format, then fill in the title, genre, tags, and description. The master goes straight to your own SoundCloud account - no exporting to a folder and re-uploading through the browser.

It works on a master you just rendered and on anything in your history, so an older master can be published without reprocessing. Publishing is the only time your audio leaves your machine.

Linux isn't on the roadmap yet - write in if it matters to you. The underlying framework supports it, so it's a "when there's demand" thing rather than a "never" thing.

Any length. Short tracks (under about 30 minutes) are analyzed and mastered in memory, same as always. Longer files - DJ mixes, extended sets, live recordings - are handled automatically.

Acetate measures the full arc, identifies level changes across the arrangement, then shows you a review screen where you can accept, reject, or fine-tune each transition before rendering. When it sounds right, it renders straight to disk in WAV, AIFF, MP3, or FLAC.

No need to split files, no round-tripping through a DAW.

When Acetate processes a long file, it identifies transitions and energy shifts across the arrangement and proposes a gain adjustment at each point. These are called level edits.

On the review screen, each edit appears with a timestamp, a gain value, and a ramp duration. You can hear the transition in context, accept the suggestion, adjust the gain, or remove it entirely. Edits you accept are held at the set gain until the next edit, with a smooth ramp between them.

The goal is continuity - the mix stays at a consistent level and the handoff between tracks is invisible. You stay in control of every decision.

For mastering, no. All audio processing runs locally and your files stay on your machine.

Acetate goes online in three places: activating your license (one-time), checking for updates, and - only when you ask it to - publishing a finished master to your own SoundCloud account.

Email hello@acetate.lol within 14 days and we'll refund you, no questions. Masters you've already exported are yours to keep.