About
Who builds these tools, and why.
Ohlhorst Digital is run by Jan Ohlhorst — a mastering engineer with 25+ years of experience and a degree in electrical engineering and information technology. That combination is the whole point: the ears come from the mastering room, the DSP from the engineering side. Based in Germany, he’s spent most of his career splitting time between the two.
The engineering side isn’t abstract either: early in his career he developed OFDM physical-layer simulators for 4G/5G mobile networks at Panasonic and contributed to several patents — the same signal-processing fundamentals that underpin the plugins today, all written from scratch in C++.
His mastering studio, finemastering.de, works with artists, bands and both independent and major labels worldwide. The plugins released under Ohlhorst Digital are the same tools he builds for that work — internal utilities that turned out to be useful enough to ship publicly. Some of the algorithms have been in active development for 10+ years, with more on the way.
What we make
Principles
- Built in the mastering room. Every algorithm has been refined over many years across mixing and mastering sessions before being released.
- Focused, not stripped. Each plugin owns one audio task with the controls it actually needs — not a single-knob effect, not a channel-strip bundle.
- Hard to misuse. A small set of curated controls in front of many DSP parameters. We invest the time so the user can't easily make it sound bad — every visible control should earn its place by making a real, predictable difference.
- Function-led design. Clean, fully vector-based design with subtle depth. No skeuomorphic chrome or 3D-rendered knobs — just crisp controls with soft shadows that give structure without clutter. Color-coding connects controls that belong together, so the UI reads at a glance.
- Release bar. Anything new must either solve a problem in a way that hasn't been done before, or simply sound better than what already exists.
Get in touch
Bug, question, or feature idea? Drop a line on our support page.