Episode 635 – Oeksound’s Hannes Andersson Talks Soothe 3 and More

Audio plugin developers who assume machine learning is the right tool will find the process used by Hannes Andersson and the team at Oeksound genuinely surprising.

Hannes is CEO of Oeksound, the creator of Soothe, the dynamic resonance suppressor that became so dominant on Spotify’s Top 50, yet it’s team rebuilt the algorithm from scratch. 

Oeksound’s secret is two people in a room listening for hours until the math feels right, a standard that quietly shaped the sound of a lot of recorded music without anyone outside the company knowing it.

When Soothe 2 went viral during COVID and overuse artifacts began appearing on Spotify and Apple Music top tracks, the team rebuilt the core. 

Knowing what a plugin is actually taking away matters as much as knowing how to use it, and Oeksound’s other tools reflect that same standard. 

Bloom, the adaptive tone shaper, reads the entire incoming signal before processing, so a high-shelf boost for warmth automatically pulls back when sibilance arrives rather than amplifying it. 

Spiff began as a mouth-click suppressor for close-mic’d vocals and evolved into an adaptive transient shaper that Andersson also uses for frequency-specific stereo placement, boosting attack on one channel while keeping overall levels balanced. 

Every product is tuned through hours of listening sessions by engineers who also write, produce, and mix, because emotion is the only benchmark Oeksound trusts.

You can hear it at Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, Mixcloud, Spotify, Deezer, and TuneIn Radio.

Also, a video version of this podcast is now available on YouTube as well.

Enjoy the show!

Chapters:

00:00:00 – Coming up…

00:01:05 – What is Soothe and how did the idea originate?

00:05:04 – How does Soothe differ from a standard dynamic EQ?

00:06:34 – How does Soothe handle latency?

00:08:03 – The ten year evolution from Soothe 1 to Soothe 3

00:10:45 – The last minute sidechain feature that changed everything

00:15:09 – What makes Soothe 3 more forgiving than its predecessor?

00:18:10 – How do the dual algorithms handle crossover frequencies?

00:19:42 – Where do engineers use Soothe most and what are the unusual applications?

00:23:24 – What is Bloom and how does adaptive tone shaping work?

00:27:57 – Why ear tuning beats machine learning for audio plugin design

00:32:32 – How Spiff was born from mouth clicks and vocal transients

00:36:50 – Creative uses for Spiff beyond transient control

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