1. Welcome
Orra Tone Zone Pro is a tonal balance processor for full mixes and masters. It compares your mix with a target curve, the tonal balance of a real finished master in your genre, and brings the mix toward it. It sits on the mix bus or the master bus.
It works in two stages. SCOUT listens to a stretch of the mix, plans up to six EQ bands (cuts as EQ, dynamic where a problem comes and goes; boosts through saturation), checks the plan on the recorded audio and corrects it, all in about half a second. Then the AUTO engine keeps the balance in place as the song moves from verse to chorus, with a small, slow correction on top of Scout's bands.
Every band is also yours: nine saturation modes, a full dynamic EQ, smoothed filters that never click, and oversampling up to 8x when a band saturates. AUTO GAIN matches the output's loudness to the input's, so what you compare is tone, not level.
If you know the free Orra Tone Zone: Pro is a separate product with its own licence, settings and curves. Sessions made with Tone Zone keep using Tone Zone.
2. System Requirements
VST3, Audio Unit (AU) and AAX (Pro Tools) on macOS; VST3 and AAX on Windows.
10.13 or later (macOS 11 or later on Apple Silicon). Universal 2.
The analysis and the curves are the same at every rate.
Mono or stereo.
93 ms at 44.1 kHz and 85 ms at 48 kHz, the same time at higher rates, plus 3 to 5 samples when OVERSAMPLING is on. Reported to the host, so delay compensation keeps every track in time.
One licence key activates the plugin on the machines your purchase allows. A 14-day demo can be started from the plugin without a key. Activating in one instance unlocks every open instance within about a second, and offline bounces always render.
3. Quick Start
From an empty master bus to a balanced mix in a minute:
- 1.Insert Orra Tone Zone Pro last on your mix or master bus, before a final limiter.
- 2.Open the TARGET menu and pick the genre and curve closest to your song. Not sure? Pick any curve in the genre; you can switch later and run Scout again.
- 3.Switch AUTO GAIN on (OUTPUT card), so every comparison is at matched loudness.
- 4.Play the busiest part of the song, usually the last chorus, and press SCOUT. The button counts down the seconds it still has to hear (8 by default; right-click to choose up to 60). Stopped playback does not count.
- 5.Scout thinks for a moment, sets the bands and hands over to AUTO. The line under the cards says what it did.
- 6.Play the whole song and compare with BYP. Too much? Right-click SCOUT and pick a gentler AUTO strength, or Undo Scout to go back exactly to where you were.
Everything Scout sets is an ordinary control afterwards: move any band, knob or button as you like.
4. Interface Tour
The ORRA TONE ZONE PRO wordmark (click for the licence panel and links), SCOUT, RESET, BYP, AUTO, the A B C D slots and STORE, the TARGET menu, ADD CURVE, and the ? key for tips.
Your mix (blue), the target and its normal range (green), AUTO’s correction (orange), the EQ curve with its six band nodes, the OUTPUT curve, the range handles at the edges and the DELTA overlay.
CORRECTION, SPEED and CEILING: how much, how fast and how far AUTO corrects.
The selected band: shape, mode, on/off, FREQ, GAIN (DRIVE in a saturation mode), Q, and the DYNAMIC section.
OUTPUT trim, TO ORRA EQ, AUTO GAIN and OVERSAMPLING.
Under the cards: what Scout, RESET or TO ORRA EQ just did. It fades after 12 seconds.
5. SCOUT
Scout sets up the six bands so AUTO has little left to do. It only works on what it heard, so give it the part of the song the target describes: the busiest, fullest section.
What happens when you press it
- 1.Listen. Scout records the plugin’s input for the chosen time. Press SCOUT again to cancel.
- 2.Plan. It measures the recording’s tonal balance exactly like the target was measured, and fits up to six bands together. Needed cuts become EQ bands; where that region’s level comes and goes, a dynamic cut that only works while it is louder than usual. Needed boosts use saturation, or plain EQ, your choice. Differences inside the genre’s normal range, the spread between good masters of that genre, are mostly left alone.
- 3.Check on the audio. It plays the recording through the real EQ, measures what is left and corrects the plan, up to three rounds. This is what makes a dynamic cut or a saturation boost land where it should, since both do less on real music than on paper.
- 4.Hand over. It applies the bands, sets CORRECTION to your AUTO strength, SPEED to 10 % and CEILING to 50 %, and switches OVERSAMPLING to 4x if it used saturation while oversampling was Off.
Scout keeps its bands within safe limits rather than chasing the target at any cost. It respects the range handles on the display and never touches TARGET, OUTPUT, AUTO GAIN or the slots.
The right-click menu
How Scout lifts what is missing. Auto, the default, picks a saturator per band by frequency. Pick one yourself to use it everywhere, or EQ bell for no saturation at all.
How much audio Scout records. 8 s by default; 16 s on a chorus is a good habit. Longer is steadier on busy, changing material.
The CORRECTION Scout leaves AUTO at. Normal by default.
Puts all six bands, CORRECTION, SPEED, CEILING and OVERSAMPLING back exactly as they were before the last Scout run. One step; greyed out after it is used, while Scout is listening, and once a session, preset, slot or factory program has been loaded.
Your menu choices are remembered on this computer.
Oversampling and Scout
Oversampling only matters for saturation; plain EQ bands are exact without it. So Scout turns OVERSAMPLING on (4x) only when its plan uses saturation and oversampling is Off, and turns it back Off when a later plan uses no saturation, but only if it is still the 4x Scout set. A setting you chose yourself is never switched off.
Getting the best from Scout
- •Scout the full mix at its busiest. Scout is built and tested for full mixes and masters, not single instruments or stems.
- •Pick the target first. Changing the target afterwards changes what AUTO aims at, but not Scout’s bands: run Scout again.
- •Run it again after a big change to the mix. Each run replaces the six bands.
- •The same capture always gives the same plan. Captures of different parts of a song can give slightly different plans that sound alike: a dynamic band draws its full range on the display, so it can look bigger than it sounds.
- •Every run is written to scout_log.txt in the Tone Zone Pro folder: what it measured, each band and why, and what was left.
6. AUTO: the Auto EQ
AUTO compares your mix with the target all the time and applies a smooth correction curve, the orange area on the display. It listens after your six bands and before its own correction, so it only corrects what the bands leave. When Scout has set the bands, that is very little.
How much of the difference AUTO removes. Scout sets it to your AUTO strength. At 0 % AUTO is off in effect.
How fast the analyzer and the correction follow the music: 0 % averages over about 3 seconds (mastering), 100 % over about 0.3 s (mixing). Scout sets 10 %, so AUTO drifts gently with the song and never pumps.
The most AUTO may move any one band. Cuts use the full ceiling, boosts half of it.
Switches the correction on or off. The analysis, the display and your bands keep working when it is off, and the latency stays the same, so switching never glitches.
How AUTO behaves
- Sparse sections, Targets describe full mixes. When the spectrum thins out (an intro, a breakdown, a solo vocal) AUTO backs off instead of pushing a thin section toward a full-mix curve.
- Section changes, A sudden change in the arrangement briefly holds the correction, so AUTO does not lurch at every transition.
- Pauses, When playback stops, AUTO holds its correction and carries on from where it was when you press play. The display settles to flat while nothing plays.
- Range handles, The two gold tabs at the left and right edges of the display set the range AUTO and Scout may work in. Drag them in to keep, say, the sub below 40 Hz or the air above 16 kHz untouched.
7. The Display
Your mix after the six bands: what AUTO hears.
The target curve and its normal range, the tolerance a good master of the genre stays within.
AUTO’s correction right now: below the line cuts, above it lifts.
The EQ curve of the six bands. Each node is a band, coloured by its mode; saturation bands carry a letter.
A faint shape shows the band’s full range; the filled part is what it is doing right now.
The plugin’s output, after AUTO and AUTO GAIN.
One bar per band from the target to the OUTPUT curve, green inside the normal range and orange outside.
Mouse and keys on the display
Frequency (left, right) and gain or drive (up, down). A dynamic band’s node moves in frequency only: its static gain is the GAIN knob.
Fine: the node moves at a fifth of the speed.
The band’s Q, its width.
Gain or drive back to 0 dB.
The band’s mode: EQ or one of the nine saturators.
The frequency range AUTO and Scout may work in.
Adds a target curve from them.
8. The Six Bands
Click a node on the display to select its band; the BAND card shows it. Every band is a smoothed filter: automation never zippers, and switching a band on or off, its shape, mode, dynamics or drive fades instead of clicking.
The filter shape.
EQ, or a saturator on the band.
The band in or out of the chain.
Centre (bell) or corner (shelf) frequency.
The band’s gain. In a saturation mode the knob reads DRIVE.
Width. Higher is narrower.
Defaults: a low shelf at 80 Hz, bells at 250 Hz, 1 kHz, 3 kHz and 8 kHz, and a high shelf at 12 kHz, all at 0 dB. Double-click a knob to reset it, or its readout to type a value. Knobs drag at a steady rate, about 400 pixels for the whole range.
9. Dynamic EQ
With DYN on, a band listens to its own frequency range and moves only while that range is above the threshold: a harsh vocal gets tamed on the loud notes and left alone on the quiet ones.
Makes the band dynamic.
Upward: the dynamic gain lifts instead of cutting. Off is classic ducking.
Auto threshold: the threshold follows the band’s own average level over about 1.5 s, and THRESH becomes an offset around it (−24 dB is no offset). The band acts whenever it is louder than usual; pauses hold the average. Scout’s dynamic cuts use this.
Where the band starts working. The detector hears the band’s range, not the whole mix.
The most the band will move.
How fast it reacts when its range gets louder.
How fast it recovers.
The ratio, 3:1 by default, is available as a host parameter. Scout sets attack and release by frequency: slower in the lows so bass stays clean, faster in the highs so they let go between hits.
10. Saturation
A saturation band runs a saturator in parallel on its own frequency range. DRIVE is the band's lift in dB at any frequency, so a +3 dB saturation boost is as loud as a +3 dB EQ boost; the harmonics come on top. Loud material pushes the saturator harder and lifts a little less, which Scout measures and allows for.
Even harmonics: body and warmth. Scout reaches for it in the low mids.
A soft, symmetric push blended with the dry signal: clean and tight.
A console-style colour with a softened top.
Soft third harmonic with a head-bump shape: weight without fizz. Scout reaches for it down low.
Denser, compressing drive. Scout reaches for it when the upper mids are unsteady.
Odd harmonics: focus and bite. Scout reaches for it for presence and bigger mid lifts.
Germanium diode clipping: the grittiest edge of the set. Give it 4x or 8x on bright material.
The cleanest of the set, about 0.4 % distortion at 6 dB. Scout reaches for it across the mids.
Adds only what sits above the band: air. Scout reaches for it up top.
11. Oversampling
Saturation makes harmonics, and harmonics above half the sample rate fold back into the audible range as aliasing. OVERSAMPLING, on the OUTPUT card, runs the six bands at 2x, 4x or 8x the sample rate to prevent that. Its filters are flat to 20 kHz and put anything that still folds above 20 kHz.
Default. Plain EQ bands need nothing more: they are exact at the session rate.
Clean for gentle saturation.
What Scout switches on for saturation. The best balance of cleanliness and CPU.
For the hard modes (Diode, Power Tube) on bright material.
Switching glides over about 10 ms, so it is safe during playback. At 88.2 and 96 kHz, 8x runs as 4x, and at 176.4 and 192 kHz as 2x: the processing never runs above 384 kHz. Oversampling cannot be automated.
12. Target Curves
A target is the tonal balance of one real finished master: its busiest 20 seconds, the part a mix is usually judged on. Tone Zone Pro ships 60 hand-picked curves in 19 genres, plus Flat. The TARGET menu lists them by genre; a genre with several curves opens as a submenu. Your own curves appear in the same menu, in their genres.
Your own curves
Analyses reference tracks (WAV, AIFF, MP3, FLAC) and loads the result as the target. Several files are averaged. Each file is measured over its busiest 20 seconds, like the factory curves. You can also drop files on the display.
Keeps the loaded curve: in a factory genre, one of yours, or a new one. It asks before replacing a curve of the same name.
Clears the loaded reference; the TARGET menu’s curve is aimed at again.
Opens the CURVES browser.
The CURVES browser
- •Genres on the left, the selected genre’s curves on the right. Click a curve to preview it against the current target; double-click to load it.
- •Make, rename and delete your own genres. Factory genres are locked, but your curves can live in them too.
- •Rename, move (drag a curve onto a genre), duplicate, copy and delete your curves. Deleted curves go to the Trash. Factory curves can be loaded or copied into a genre.
- •Open Folder shows the genre’s folder on disk. Curves are plain .otzcurve files, one folder per genre, so you can share them by copying the files. Curves saved in the free Orra Tone Zone use the same format and can be copied in.
13. Output and Workflow
Final level trim, smoothed so automation never zippers.
Matches the output’s loudness to the input’s, measured the way a LUFS meter hears (ITU-R BS.1770), up to 12 dB either way. Boosts and cuts can then no longer fool your ears into preferring the louder version. It holds its gain through pauses.
See Oversampling.
Comparing and resetting
Four slots with complete settings. Click to recall, Shift+click to overwrite a slot with the current settings.
Stores the current settings into the active slot.
Bypass: a 20 ms crossfade to the dry signal, delayed to match the plugin’s latency, with everything still running underneath, so switching back is seamless. The host’s own bypass does the same.
Every parameter back to its default: bands, knobs, toggles, oversampling, auto gain. The target and the slots are kept.
14. TO ORRA EQ
TO ORRA EQ, on the OUTPUT card, saves the six bands as a preset for Orra EQ 1.5.0 or later.
Arrives as one Orra EQ Dynamic EQ band with the same settings, AUTO included, plus a plain band only if its GAIN is not 0 dB.
Arrives as the matching Orra EQ saturator at the same lift.
Orra EQ’s Presets folder, in the Tone Zone category. It appears the next time you open Orra EQ’s preset browser, without reloading the plugin.
Orra EQ is sold separately. Without it installed, Tone Zone Pro says so and offers GET ORRA EQ or SAVE ANYWAY, for moving the preset to another computer. Orra EQ 1.5.0 is a free update for owners.
15. Tips in Your Language
Hover any control for half a second and a tip explains it. The ? key switches the tips off and on; right-click it to choose English, Dutch, Japanese, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, German or French. Both choices are remembered on this computer.
16. Licence
- •On first open, choose Start 14-Day Demo (everything works) or Enter License Key. Your key arrives by email after purchase at orraaudio.com.
- •Click the ORRA TONE ZONE PRO wordmark for the licence panel: status, version, links, and Deactivate to move the licence to another computer.
- •An unlicensed plugin is silent in real time, but offline bounces always render, so a session never loses the plugin in a bounce.
17. Files and Folders
~/Library/Orra Audio/Tone Zone Pro/
%APPDATA%\Orra Audio\Tone Zone Pro\
Curves (your curves, one folder per genre), scout_log.txt (every Scout run, rotated past 1 MB), editor_prefs.xml (window size, tips, language, Scout menu choices) and the licence files.
18. Questions and Answers
Scout says "not enough signal".
It heard too little non-silent audio. Play the mix while it listens; stopped playback does not count down.
The blue curve still differs from the target after Scout.
That is by design. Differences inside the genre’s normal range (the green zone) are how good masters differ; Scout pulls them in only a little and leaves your mix its character. Use DELTA to see what is still outside the zone.
AUTO does little in the intro or a breakdown.
Intentional: targets describe full mixes, so AUTO backs off when the arrangement thins out, and engages fully again when the spectrum is full.
A Scout run looks very different from the last one.
A dynamic band draws its full range, so two plans that sound alike can look different. Compare by ear with BYP, check scout_log.txt, or Undo Scout.
I use Orra EQ before Tone Zone Pro. Do I get double correction?
No. AUTO listens after everything in front of it, including Orra EQ and the six bands, and only corrects what is still off target.
Can I use it on a single track?
It works on any track and delay compensation keeps it in time, but the targets and Scout are made for full mixes. On a single instrument, use a reference curve from ADD CURVE, or AUTO off and the bands as a precision EQ.
My exported preset does not show in Orra EQ.
It is in Orra EQ’s Presets folder, in the Tone Zone category, and appears the next time you open Orra EQ’s preset browser. The presets need Orra EQ 1.5.0 or later, a free update for owners.
Does oversampling change the sound when no band saturates?
Barely, but it is not needed then: plain EQ bands are exact without it, which is why it defaults to Off and Scout only turns it on for saturation.
Why does the plugin add latency?
AUTO needs a window of audio to measure and correct smoothly. The plugin reports it, so your DAW keeps everything in time. BYP keeps the latency too, so the timing never jumps; for tracking, take the plugin out of the monitoring path.
19. Tips for Great Results
Scout the chorus, judge the song
Scout what the target describes, the busiest part; then listen to the whole song. AUTO at a slow SPEED carries the balance through the quieter sections.
Level-match every decision
Keep AUTO GAIN on while you compare targets, strengths or your own band moves. A louder version always sounds better for a moment.
Gentle on masters, Normal on mixes
A finished master usually needs little: try Gentle AUTO strength. A raw mix often wants Normal.
Make your own targets
Drop 5 to 20 masters you love from one genre onto the display to average them, SAVE the curve into its genre, and it is in the TARGET menu from then on.