Mastering QC Loop
Scan your tracks for the problems that wreck a release — and change nothing until you say so.
Anyone who wants a safety check before publishing: catch clipping, phase issues, abrupt fades, and dead air.
Before a record goes out, a handful of small problems can quietly undermine it: a track that clips, channels that cancel out on mono speakers, an abrupt cut where a fade should breathe, dead air on the end, a tail artifact, or a jarring volume jump between two songs. This loop is a check-only pass that finds all of them and reports them in plain tables.
Crucially it changes nothing on its own — it flags what's risky and asks which issues are intentional, so you stay in control. It is the diagnostic half of mastering pulled out as its own loop, for people who want to inspect before they commit.
The focused repo script is read-only by construction: ffmpeg receives no audio output path, sources are opened read-only for hashing, and the only write is its JSON report.
Skills & actions it uses
The concrete, reusable skills this loop calls to actually do the work.
npm run audio:qcRuns the focused read-only technical scan and writes only technical-qc-report.json.
The loop
- 1
Re-measure loudness and peaks
Confirm where each track actually sits before judging anything else.
- 2
Scan for hard faults
Detect clipping and inter-sample peaks, plus phase and mono-compatibility problems.
- 3
Classify the edges
Detect fade-in/out style, abrupt cuts, dead-air tails, and stray tail artifacts.
- 4
Check the transitions
Flag big volume jumps between consecutive tracks that would jar on an album listen.
- 5
Report, don't fix
Present plain tables with the risky tracks flagged, and ask which are intentional. No audio is altered.
Then run it again for the next song, chapter, or track.
You end with
- A diagnostic report: loudness, clipping, phase/mono, fade classification, tail artifacts, and track-to-track jumps
- A flagged list of tracks worth a manual listen — with nothing changed
How it connects
Requires
Each slot needs one loop — pick whichever fits. The recommended pick is starred.
Alternatives
A competing loop for the same job — different tool, taste, or depth. Pick whichever fits you.
Turn a folder of raw WAVs into a loudness-matched, diagnosed, cleanly-named album that streams right.
Normalize a track or album to a streaming-ready loudness — and touch nothing else.
Apply clean fades and trim dead air or tail artifacts from the ends of your tracks.