We looked at comments from various sites (YouTube, Reddit, Facebook, Gearspace) to better understand what people wanted out of this next version of Neutron.
- Existing customers expected specific new features (channel modes, delta buttons, etc).
- Producers expressed struggles with knowing when a mix is done.
- After competitive analysis, we saw an opportunity for a unique new module.
We probed into our beta community for two reasons:
1. Validate the feature requests we were seeing online.
2. Gauge excitement around new concepts.
We met as a team in Miro and brainstormed on ideas for the release based on what we were seeing on socials and within our beta. From there, we created mockups of new concept modules/functionality for us to include in a concept video we'd send to beta for feedback on.
We compiled our concept ideas into one video and asked beta for their thoughts. While lots of concepts got a lot of love and the sentiment overall was positive, there were clear winners.
Based on our research, we saw an opportunity to create a dead-simple, yet intuitive way to control the phase relationships of multiple tracks at once. Basically, we made a tool that lets you align squiggly lines very easily.
Compression and audio engineering concepts can be hard to understand and which can detract you from the creative. We thought we could leverage some new tech from RX 11, our audio repair tool, to make a turn-it-up, sound good experience for any producer.
Clipping is a very common part of a producer/engineer's workflow but as a comprehensive suite of plugins, Neutron 5 was lacking in this sense. It felt like a no brainer to add and the sonic improvements that come out of the processing are essential.
