AMSTERDAM―Nugen Audio will be celebrating 20 years of providing top-of-the-line audio editing plug-ins to audio professionals around the world during IBC 2024 at Stand 8.D79.
Founded by an acclaimed DJ/EDM producer and the lead programmer of a top UK game development company, Nugen Audio first launched with stereo-image-related plug-ins for music production. Today, the brand has expanded to include award-winning loudness metering/correction, surround sound, mixing/mastering, tracking and audio analysis tools that are used by some of the world’s top names in post-production, broadcast and music.
“I co-founded Nugen Audio in 2004 with the goal of changing the world of audio,” says Dr. Paul Tapper, Nugen Audio CEO and co-founder. “I am thrilled to have created a brand that has not only become a ‘household’ name in our industry, but that has grown so impressively over the past 20 years. I look forward to what our team will accomplish in the next two decades.”
Tapper developed many of the original algorithms that form the basis of Nugen Audio’s products, including loudness metering and correction, DynApt, upmixing and True Peak limiting. Tapper began his career as a lead programmer at Runecraft and worked as a lead programmer for Team 17 Digital from 2003-2010, while simultaneously creating tools for Nugen Audio. Today, in addition to his executive role with Nugen, Tapper also runs the new immersive gaming brand, Fruity Systems.
The company said that from the outset, Nugen Audio has been fully focused on providing solutions to real-life problems. With a love for and fascination with the technology and theory behind audio processing, Nugen engineers have always strived to apply those techniques to create the tools that real users need day-to-day.
“The goal is always to enhance users’ lives — either by making existing challenges easier to overcome, such as with the VisLM loudness meter, which has become an industry standard, or by producing new and exciting possibilities to ignite the imagination, like upmixing to immersive audio with Halo Upmix or the ground-breaking new reverb technology in Paragon,” says Nugen Audio CTO Charles Blessing. “We continually endeavor to identify product categories that are either new or currently under-served, and then strive to create the most practically useful solutions in those categories to ensure our customers can run successful and effective businesses themselves.”
Blessing first joined Nugen Audio in 2013 as a Software Engineer, which means he has also played a pivotal role in the development of many of the brand’s algorithms. Prior to Nugen, Blessing, who has a degree in Computer Science and Maths from the University of York, held several programmer and engineer positions with Team17 Software, where he first connected with Tapper.
“Everything we do at Nugen Audio originates with our values,” says CMO Sophie Guest, who first joined the company in 2018. “We believe in making decisions based on what will give the greatest benefit over the long-term, on valuing people, and that quality is a higher priority than quantity.”
