Only needed for stem separation. Everything else in BEATref works
without it — install the model when you want to solo drums, bass, vocals or other
instruments in your reference track. It survives plugin updates, so this is a
one-time download.
Installation
Open BeatRef-v0.143.0.pkg and follow the installer — it puts the VST3 in place for you.
Restart your DAW and rescan plugins if it doesn't show up right away (Ableton: Settings → Plug-Ins → Rescan). The installer puts BeatRef.vst3 in /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3.
Optional: open the stem model installer the same way. Only needed for stem separation.
Requires an Apple Silicon Mac on macOS 13.3 or newer. Intel Macs are not supported — the installer will tell you rather than fail silently. During the beta every build runs with full functionality and no licence key until 31 December 2026.
Quick start
Put BEATref on your master track, last in the chain. It listens to your mix there and plays the reference through the same output.
Hit LOAD (top left) and pick a track you want to compare against. BEATref detects its BPM and grid and time-stretches it to your project tempo.
Press play in your DAW. A is your mix, B is the reference, both locked to the same bar. Switch with the big A/B buttons or the keyboard.
MATCH on the divider between the two waveforms level-matches the reference to your mix (LUFS), so you compare balance, not loudness.
Open ANALYSIS at the bottom for spectrum, low-end and stereo views. The ? button in the header replays the guided tour, which walks through every control.
Feedback & bugs
Something's off? Tell us.
Mail info@reyneke.eu with your macOS version, DAW and version, the BEATref version (bottom of the plugin window), and what you did right before it went wrong. A screenshot or a short screen recording helps a lot.
Plugin doesn't show up in your DAW at all? Run this in Terminal and attach the report it writes to your Desktop: bash "/Library/Application Support/BeatRef/tester-report.sh"
What's New in v0.143.0
Mini view: switch between A/B and DJ and toggle stems right in the small window. The strip is a little wider and laid out on a clean grid.
Easier to read: larger text in the mini view's reference picker, in tooltips and in help texts.
The footer now shows when the beta ends and how many days are left. When the beta ends, BeatRef keeps running as LITE unless you enter a licence key (1 reference instead of 5, no stems, no DJ-library import).
v0.142.02026-10-06
Stems: switch Drums, Bass, Other and Vocals on and off independently (e.g. drums and bass together). ALL plays the original track. Tempo, grid, sections, key and AUTO always use the full track.
Switching stems is about three times faster.
v0.141.02026-10-06
Drag an audio file from the Finder or Ableton's browser onto BeatRef to load it as the reference (WAV, AIFF, MP3, FLAC). An orange outline shows where to drop.
Mono reference files no longer crash the plugin.
Quitting Ableton with BeatRef loaded no longer crashes in rare cases.
v0.140.22026-09-26
Library: MP3 files with large embedded cover art now show their title, artist and genre (previously the tags behind the artwork were never read). Applies to files added from now on.
Library: tracks without a tempo show "—" once analysis is finished, instead of "…" forever. Hover it to see how to analyse again.
Library: sorting a column in descending order keeps tracks without that value at the bottom.
Library: clicking a second file-dialog button while a dialog is already open no longer closes the open one.
Closing the plugin while a long library import is running no longer stalls the DAW.
v0.140.12026-09-24
PUNCH and STEREO now also measure while you loop a section in your DAW — a 1-bar loop no longer leaves the panels waiting forever, and every bar of a longer loop counts.
The first bar after pressing play or jumping in the timeline is no longer mixed with audio from before the jump.
More accurate MID/HIGH punch readings for your track (a filter start-up artefact made them read too high).
Closing the plugin window while a long reference is still being measured no longer waits for it to finish.
v0.140.02026-09-24
PUNCH and STEREO now compare the loud part of your track with the loud part of the reference, instead of whatever both happen to play at that moment. The reference is measured once over its whole file; your track is collected bar by bar while it plays, and quieter parts (breaks, intros) are left out automatically. Verdicts no longer jump around.
While your track's loud part is still being collected, the panels say so ("Listening — play your loudest part (2 of 4 bars)"); afterwards a small line shows how many bars each side contributes.
v0.139.22026-09-24
KICK/BASS (development builds): instead of always saying "Load a reference", the panel now names what is missing — e.g. "Your track: no steady kick bar in view — play a part with a 4/4 kick, ideally looped" or "Reference: no steady kick bar in its first 90 s".
v0.139.12026-09-24
KICK/BASS (development builds): the BASS zone can no longer be drawn in front of the kick when the bass starts late in the beat, and the headline no longer says "matches the reference" while the chips below still show small differences.
v0.139.02026-09-24
KICK/BASS (development builds only, not yet visible to testers) now shows the low end over one beat: your curve against the reference's with the kicks lined up, KICK and BASS zones, a plain-language verdict ("Kick tail runs into the bass") and ✓ / ▲ / ▼ chips for the SUB / LOW / MID balance.
v0.138.02026-09-24
The STEREO tab now checks mono safety in plain words ("SUB is too wide — the low end will lose power on mono club systems", "cancels in mono", "like REF"). Each band's width is a bar growing out of the centre, with the reference as amber brackets; bars reaching the red edges cancel in mono.
STEREO says "Press play" instead of staying black when nothing is playing.
Your mix is blue in every analysis panel now; the reference stays orange.
v0.137.02026-09-24
The PUNCH tab now says in plain words whether each band is as punchy as the reference ("Low end is less punchy than REF — the kick transient is likely being limited or clipped"). The reference is an amber target zone, your mix a blue marker — inside the zone means you match.
PUNCH shows "Press play" or "Load a reference to compare" instead of empty rows when there is nothing to measure yet.
v0.136.02026-09-24
Easier to read: no text in the plugin is smaller than 9 px any more (DJ and BLEND labels, section strip, A/B captions), and dim labels and inactive reference tabs now have enough contrast to read on every background, menus included.
One consistent accent colour: all orange elements now share the same shade instead of two slightly different oranges.
The close button of the guided tour is now easy to hit, and the cache slider in Settings shows its track instead of a lone dot. The library's preview level slider is orange like every other control instead of system blue.
Section labels (Intro / Drop / Break …) are now based on the whole track, not only its first 10 seconds — a bar with loud bass but no kick is no longer labelled Drop.
The loading indicator no longer stays on when a load is interrupted by a stem toggle or a beat re-detect.
Activating a licence no longer reopens the licence panel afterwards.
If the reference library file on disk is damaged, it is now kept as a backup copy instead of being overwritten with an empty library.
Opening the library twice in quick succession no longer doubles every action in it.
v0.135.22026-09-20
Loading a reference no longer freezes the window: the file is decoded in the background, the previous reference keeps playing until the new one is ready.
Closed a second likely cause of the occasional crash when closing the plugin while a reference was still being analysed.
References longer than 15 minutes are refused with a message instead of being loaded: BeatRef compares tracks, and a full live set costs over a gigabyte of memory per tab without ever getting a usable beat grid. Unreadable files now show a message too.
VIEW AUTO no longer zooms onto a phantom loop after Stop → Play: a restart was mistaken for a loop wrap, so the view showed a 1–4 bar window that grew with every later stop. Without a host loop the view now pages in 8 bars as intended; a real host loop is unaffected.
Error messages are now hard to miss: a solid red banner below the header that stays for 12 seconds, with the important numbers highlighted.
v0.135.12026-09-15
Stability: the reference-loading worker now stops cleanly when the plugin is removed or the DAW quits while a long file is still being analysed. This was the most likely cause of the occasional crash on quit.
Stability: closing the editor in the same instant a host automation changed a BeatRef parameter could crash; fixed.
Audio: a host that hands BeatRef a larger block than it announced is now passed through untouched instead of overrunning internal buffers.
Audio: at 96 kHz and above with small buffers, the reference could stay silent after a transport jump; the seek path is fixed and its scratch buffer now scales with the sample rate.
Audio: the MONO / SIDES monitor fold no longer switches itself off while the transport is stopped in BLEND or DJ mode.
Sections: the section map used a biased median for its density threshold, so tracks with an even number of blocks could classify differently; fixed.
UI: clicking into a waveform did nothing while pretending to seek; the click is gone until a real seek exists.
UI: tooltips that change with state (MIRROR / FREE, PDC AUTO, reference tab names) showed the text from the first hover forever; fixed. The first-run tour can no longer restart on top of a tour you already opened yourself.
v0.135.02026-09-14
The guided tour now opens by itself the first time BeatRef is opened on a machine, and only that once. The ? button in the header replays it any time.
Tooltips on the controls that had none: SET BEAT, the analysis panel toggle, the A/B · BLEND · DJ mode bar, and the RESET / RE-DETECT / FIT buttons in the timing popups.
The empty reference strip now says where to load a track from.
The licence view links to the beta page on phux.one — downloads, changelog and how to report a bug.
v0.134.22026-09-14
Re-detecting the first beat or re-analysing the current reference from the menu takes effect again. Since the multi-reference engine those results were silently dropped and the old grid stayed on screen (B-35).
LiveCompanion link: if the LiveCompanion port was changed before BeatRef ever connected, BeatRef now picks the new port up on its own (checked every 10 s while unreachable) instead of needing a plugin reload.
v0.134.12026-09-01
Two BeatRef instances in one Live set no longer fight over the same Stream Deck key. Each instance now registers under its own id (`beatref`, `beatref-b`, …), and the id is saved with the project, so the deck keeps its mapping after a reload.
v0.134.02026-08-31
The monitor mode (A / B / BLEND / DJ) can now be switched from LiveCompanion's Stream Deck integration — a deck key can step through all four modes, not just toggle A/B. The plugin reports the audible mode back, so the key face always shows what you actually hear.
v0.133.02026-08-29
BeatRef now links to LiveCompanion when it is running on the same machine: it pushes A/B/BLEND/DJ status and which reference is loaded, and accepts commands from LiveCompanion's Stream Deck integration such as switching A/B. If LiveCompanion isn't running, this is a fully silent no-op — nothing to configure, nothing to see.
v0.132.02026-08-29
The reference waveform now shows the track's structure: a thin colored strip along its bottom edge marks the detected Intro, Drop, Break and Outro sections across the whole track, with a marker for where the reference currently plays — so you always know where in the arrangement you are.
Next to the reference's BPM and key, a countdown tells you how many bars remain until the next section — "DROP in 8" means the reference's drop lands in eight bars.
v0.131.02026-08-22
The PDC dot in the footer now warns when the delay compensation has drifted: BeatRef's beat detector keeps measuring the delay independently, and a lasting disagreement with the applied value turns the dot amber.
Pointing at the PDC readout says how far off it looks and what to do about it — stop and play again to re-measure, or use RECALC in the PDC panel.
The warning also covers a delay that changes while the transport keeps running — adding a plugin upstream mid-playback used to leave the dot green with nothing to measure.
The PDC settings panel has a close button.
Known Issues
Switching reference tabs, toggling a stem or re-detecting the beat while a new file is still decoding (a few hundred ms) cancels that load silently — load the file again.
None new.
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