Capture from your DAW

WavRead Bridge is an AU and VST3 plugin. It passes audio through untouched, records what goes past, and hands the files to WavRead. No exporting, no bouncing, no file management.

Three ways to use it

Where you put it	What you get
Stereo Out, set to Master	The finished mix, analysed as an ordinary track. The simplest setup, and the one to start with.
One per track or bus, set to Stem	A stem set: every part measured on its own, an arrangement grid showing what plays where, and frequency bands attributed to the parts carrying them.
Both together	A stem set whose mix is your real master — master-bus processing included — plus a measurement of what that bus adds.

Stems cannot come from the master bus

By the time audio reaches the master insert it has already been summed. The individual parts no longer exist as separate signals, and no software can pull them back apart — what separation tools do is estimate parts from a mix, which is a different thing with different accuracy.

So per-part detail needs an instance per source. Busses are the practical middle ground: drums, bass, vocals, synths, FX — five instances rather than forty, and that is the level WavRead's stem analysis works at anyway.

Arm everything at once

Instances cannot see each other — a plugin on the drum bus knows nothing about the one on vocals. So Arm all works through the app: press it in any plugin window, or on WavRead's Analyze page, and every instance in the session arms within a second. Roll the transport, stop it, and the take is analysed by itself.

The arming is cleared once a take is handed over. An arming that outlived its take would put your next transport roll into record without anyone asking for it.

What it costs to run

Measured at 48 kHz with 512-sample blocks, paced in realtime. The audio thread only copies each block into a lock-free queue, so the cost is a memcpy and it scales linearly:

Instances	Audio thread	Share of the block deadline	Whole process	Disk
1	3.9 µs/block	0.04%	0.5% of one core	0.3 MB/s
8	17.7 µs/block	0.17%	1.6% of one core	2.2 MB/s
16	37.2 µs/block	0.35%	2.7% of one core	4.4 MB/s
32	76.4 µs/block	0.72%	5.1% of one core	8.8 MB/s

No dropped audio at any of those counts. Storage is the real budget, not CPU: 24-bit stereo at 48 kHz is roughly a gigabyte per instance per hour, so a 4-minute song captured across 32 tracks is about 2 GB. Point your library at an external drive in Settings if you capture whole sessions.

What the master bus adds

Capture the master and the parts and WavRead holds the same performance twice — before and after the bus. The difference is measurable, so reverb and delay get measured rather than guessed:

Repeats — delay times in milliseconds, with the note value they land on against the detected tempo
Tail — how long what the bus adds takes to decay, measured in a gap where the parts have stopped. No gap in the take, no claim made
Tone change through the bus, per band, and how much of the master's energy is not in the parts at all

Three things look like a delay and are not one: reverb, which correlates with its own source; the music's own period, since a part playing every bar repeats every bar; and a feedback tap, which is the same delay heard again. All three are ruled out before a number is printed.

And one honest limit — a reverb that was already an insert on a channel is inside the captured part, so it is invisible to this comparison. Sends and master-bus processing are what show up.

Installing the plugin

The plugin is a separate download from the app. Both formats install to ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/ — Logic loads the AU, while Cubase, Studio One, Reaper and Live use the VST3. Rescan plugins in your DAW afterwards.

WavRead has to be running for a capture to go anywhere: the plugin writes into WavRead's own library folder and tells the app when it is done. Nothing reaches the network — the only address the plugin ever uses is 127.0.0.1.