Every source of a preset is heard, and the near layer arrives as present as the background.
The sources of a preset
13722 presets of the library play two, three or four sources, and their levels were drawn one at a
time from ranges: nothing had asked whether a texture at 0.3 is heard under a wavetable at 1.0. It
has been asked now. Every source of every such preset was rendered on its own — the preset as it is,
the other sources silent, the Foundation, Strike and Air rendered apart — and measured in ten octave
bands. The parts add up to the whole preset within a fifth of a decibel (median, over 60 presets
rendered whole). A source counts as buried when it carries under 5 % of the preset's loudness and
owns no band of its own. That was so in 6537 presets: 26 % of those with two sources, half of those
with three, 69 % of those with four.
5298 presets have new source levels. A buried source is raised until it carries 8 % of the
loudness. Where full level is not enough, the sources that are heard give way together, by 3 dB at
most, and the master gain takes the loudness back. It was done in two passes, and the library was
measured again after each: 6044 of the 6402 sources brought forward (94 %) are heard now, and the
presets with a buried source fell from 48 % to 15 %.
What a level cannot fix is left as it was. 2156 sources in 1951 presets would stay under the bar at
full level with the others giving way — a frozen spectrum on the silent end of a gong, a source that
enters after twelve seconds of a note, a source two octaves down under a band pass. Thirteen more
never sound, because a modulation route pulls their level below zero. They are for a later round.
The changed presets keep their loudness: two samples of 120 of them, rendered whole afterwards, moved
by a third of a decibel in the median, and the furthest, measured against the preset as it was, by
3 dB. Their map positions and descriptors were not measured again.
The near layer
Near events arrive as present as the background they play over. Measured against the
background, the near bank's presets lay 18 dB apart at their loudest moment, the sequences quietest.
Level cannot carry that: a blown jet, a bow and a clip each read it as part of their sound. So Near
Events has a new knob, Gain (−24 to +36 dB, after the source), and every preset of the bank
carries a measured one that brings its loudest moment to the loudness of the background. Over
backgrounds the calibration had not seen, the share of presets within ±6 LU of it rose from 61 % to
93 %.
Nine in ten presets bring a foreground. Auto gave an artist's presets a foreground at the share
the artist's table set, from 5 to 70 %, and a preset without one switches off the foreground that is
playing — so most steps of a journey were silent near the ear. The shares keep their order and now
run from 90 to 100 %: 95 % of the pack presets bring one.
Auto no longer compounds Every. Auto scales the near preset's Every by a factor of its own for
each preset, and read the value to scale from the engine, which gets a new preset a block later — so
it scaled the result of the last scaling, preset change after preset change, until the ceiling.
Whistler's 200 s at a factor of 1.18 came out as 142 s instead of 236.
Checked
The self test, the host test and the race test in the release configuration, the thread sanitizer
on Linux, and pluginval at strictness 10. The sample library is that of 2.0.0.