Afterglow - Audio Finalizer
Your music deserves a proper ending. Not a rough export left to chance, not a generic limiter slapped across the master bus and hoped for the best, but a real finishing process that treats your music with the care it took to make it. Afterglow is a complete mastering processor built exclusively for ambient music, and everything about it, from the signal chain to the controls to the way it thinks about loudness, has been designed around what ambient music actually needs.
Drone, dark ambient, field recordings, sleep music, cinematic textures, generative soundscapes: whatever corner of the ambient world you work in, Afterglow speaks your language.
Auto: Your Instant Starting Point
Load your finished track into Afterglow, press Auto, and watch it work. Auto analyses your audio in full, reading its loudness, spectral character, low-end weight, high-frequency energy, and peak levels, then sets a complete starting configuration across every module. In seconds, you have a considered, intelligent first pass across the entire chain, ready for you to refine. It is the kind of head start that used to require either years of experience or a lot of expensive time in someone else's studio.
A Five-Stage Chain Built for Atmosphere:
Bloom opens the chain with tonal shaping: a tilt EQ that shifts the entire spectral balance warmer or brighter in a single move, a sub shelf for adding foundation to deep drones or taming an unruly low end, an air shelf that brings shimmer and life to reverb tails and soft pads, and a rumble filter that quietly removes the subsonic frequencies your ears cannot hear but your limiter absolutely can. A real-time spectrum analyser shows you the full picture as you work.
Glow adds harmonic warmth through gentle saturation, coaxing the kind of analogue richness out of a digital recording that makes it feel like something was always there rather than something that was added. The right amount of Glow is the amount you cannot quite identify, only appreciate.
Glue brings the track together. As a bus compressor voiced specifically for slow-moving, dynamic material, it adds cohesion and weight without flattening the life out of your music. Parallel compression blending lets you dial in as much presence as you want while keeping the natural rise and fall of your dynamics completely intact.
Space transforms the stereo field using mid/side processing, widening the image, shifting the balance between the centre and the sides, or softening the outer edges with diffusion so that reverbs and textures feel less like a stereo recording and more like a surrounding environment. This is where ambient music becomes immersive.
Lift closes the chain with a true-peak look-ahead limiter that brings your master to its final level cleanly and safely. Set your ceiling, bring up the gain, and let Lift protect the output without leaving a fingerprint on the music. Ambient masters tend to breathe more freely at a moderate level, and Lift is designed with that in mind.
A Complete Ambient Mastering Workflow in Your Hands
As a standalone app, Afterglow is a full "finalizing" environment. Import your audio, run Auto, shape the result with the five modules, and export directly to WAV, AIFF, FLAC, ALAC, or AAC at up to 32-bit float quality, all processed offline at full resolution. As an AUv3 plugin, it drops straight into any compatible host or DAW on your master bus.
Your music spent hours, weeks, or months being built into something worth hearing. Afterglow is how it gets finished.
Important Information:
Afterglow works on iPhone, but was built for iPad. Please consider this before purchase.
The "Auto" feature is only present in the standalone version of the app, not the AUv3 extension. This is because the analyser needs to read the full audio file from start to finish for best results.
Afterglow is not a replacement for professional mastering, but a tool for adding a final polish to your ambient tracks.
