About Lacquer and NoDAW Labs

Lacquer is the journal of CoProducer, written and published by NoDAW Labs. NoDAW Labs makes local-first audio tools for producers and mix engineers: CoProducer for measuring and repairing masters, reTUNE[432] for 432 Hz retuning, and DeepSplit for stem separation. The essays are practical notes on loudness, true peak, stems and delivery.

What Lacquer is

Lacquer is a set of answer-first essays for people who bounce masters. Each piece opens with a short answer you can quote, then gives the session advice underneath: what to measure, in what order, and when to stop. Topics include integrated and short-term LUFS, true peak and codecs, clipping, phase and mono, stems, 432 Hz retuning and release checklists.

Who publishes it

Lacquer is written and published by NoDAW Labs (nodawlabs.com). Essays are credited to NoDAW Labs as an organization. We do not use individual bylines yet, and we do not attach invented names, credentials or bios to the work.

Disclosure: NoDAW Labs makes and sells the tools mentioned in these essays. When an essay points to CoProducer, reTUNE[432] or DeepSplit, it is pointing to our own product.

The tools

CoProducer

CoProducer is local-first audio analysis and conservative repair, not a cloud mastering service. It measures integrated loudness against a −14 LUFS streaming target (pass within 1.5 LU), true peak against a −1.0 dBTP ceiling, clipped samples, sample rate and phase correlation, and gives a release score where 90 out of 100 counts as release-ready. Auto-repair may apply loudness normalization, a true-peak limiter and a gentle 25 Hz high-pass. It does not rebuild clipped transients and it does not fix phase for you. The website Analyze page shows projected post-repair numbers; the Windows desktop app writes the repaired WAV. There is a free demo, and Pro is $29 one-time, not a subscription (pricing).

reTUNE[432]

reTUNE[432] retunes audio you own from 440 Hz to 432 Hz. Its browser engine makes a free local preview of a track without uploading it, and a synced A/B player compares the two versions. The full reTUNE[432] system for Windows is an offline FFmpeg batch engine with alternate reference pitches and optional LUFS targets. The 432 Hz series on Lacquer covers the math, the history and the release checks behind it.

DeepSplit

DeepSplit separates songs into stems on your own computer. The desktop app runs Demucs-, MDX- and Roformer-class separation models locally, on a GPU if you have one, and is built to work offline once installed. It goes from two stems up to drum sub-separation and writes lossless stems.

The CoProducer site also hosts StemSplit and ScrewAI demos; you can try both from the CoProducer home page.

How we work

How the demos and measurements are made, how sources are cited and how mistakes are fixed is written up on the methodology page.

Reader notes

Each essay ends with "The booth", a thread of reader notes. Every note there was posted by a reader. We do not seed, write or stage comments. Notes that contain links wait for review before they appear. How notes are moderated.

Contact

Email NoDAW Labs at NoDAW@nodawlabs.com, or reach us through nodawlabs.com or on X at @NoDAW_Studio. To flag a mistake in an essay, leave a note on that essay or contact us there.