Strata is available at a special launch price of US$25 during December 2025. The standard price will be US$75.
Strata was conceived in approx 2020 from the frustration of not being able to see what was going on in the songs I was creating. I could see the frequency spectrum of any individual track using Voxengo Span or FabFilter Pro-Q3, but I couldn't see the frequency spectrum of all the tracks at the same time. Because a song might have 100 tracks, it wasn't obvious at any moment what tracks were occupying which parts of the frequency spectrum. I wanted to see them all at once.
I searched the internet for multi-track monitoring plugins, and found a few products (see the Competitors Page for more information), but they all seemed to be restricted in the number of tracks they could display, or I didn't like the graphic design, or they looked too complicated, or they seemed to be not up to date or seemed ancient or unsupported. In the end, I decided that I would write my own multitrack plugin and make it exactly how I wanted!
I already knew C++ well, but I had never used the JUCE framework, so I had to learn that. I created a very basic version of Strata that just showed the spectra with randomly assigned colours. Getting the TCP networking working was tricky (for various reasons), but I managed it in the end. I decided to use TCP networking for communication rather than shared memory because it is architecturally cleaner and, in the future could be modified to span multiple machines.
I started using Strata on every song I created and found it incredibly helpful. In particular, I could immediately see if any tracks were intruding down on the low end and interfering with the sub, kick, and bass. I could also see if any synth tracks were intruding up too high and interfering with my high hats and other high percussion. In the middle of the spectrum, it was now easy to see the volumes of various tracks in various frequncy ranges. I had a habit of setting background pads at too high a volume and then forgetting about them. I wouldn't notice that they were too loud during mixing because I'd be focusing on the leads. But when I looked at my song playing in Strata, it would be immediately obvious if the pads were too loud.
Strata was also incredible helpful at spotting tracks that should NOT be playing. Time and again, I would play a song through, watching it in Strata and suddenly realise that a track was playing that shouldn't even be making a sound at that point! I would say to myself "Why is the sub still running during the breakdown!" or "Why is there only one bass layer playing here?" or "Why is the white noise for the drop still playing now?" It's not that I couldn't detect these things using my ears; it was just that it was far more obvious in Strata. Simply playing through the song and watching the song in Strata became a great way of detecting a myriad of problems.
As I used Strata, I kept adding features to it as I needed them. The X axis became labelled. I picked up the track colours from the DAW. This worked wonderfully in Ableton, which was my DAW at the time (it is now Bitwig). A particular breakthrough was making the Strata window resizable. This allowed me to make Strata huge when playing through a song, and also allowed me to make Strata small and park it in one corner of my screen when working on other aspects of a song.
At some point, I realised that Strata was so useful to me that other people might find it useful too, so I started cleaning up the user interface and making it look more professional. When you make software only for yourself, you don't care about such niceties; you just want it to work. I got it working for Windows. I created a beta tester group on Facebook and got a few people to try out Strata. The reaction was mixed; some people got quite excited about it, but others didn't really seem to care.
I had to make a decision of whether to not release it, to release it for free, or whether to turn it into a commercial product. I felt that it was too useful not to release, so I decided I would release it. I considered releasing it for free, but realised that it would be a huge amount of work to release a plugin and support it, and decided that Strata would only be sustainable if I wrapped a business around it. I also wanted to receive some money for all my efforts. So I started down the commercial path.
I had registered the domain name cricketsaudio.com many years before (I had wanted to build my own SoundCloud), so I decided to go with Crickets Audio as a business name. In 2022, I started work on the website and built it out over the next two years in spare moments alongside continued development of Strata.
I guess it was predictable, but bringing Strata to market turned out to be much more work than building the plugin in the first place. For example, Strata is about 30,000 lines of C++ code, but the Crickets Audio website to sell Strata is about 30,000 lines of (Go) code too! In addition to all the corporate and product version administration work, there was all the ecommerce to build too. This website remains an ongoing project.
So here I am in 2025, finally launching Strata. If it sells well, I will build Crickets Audio into a software company with marketers and engineers and more products. If it doesn't sell well, I will endeavour to keep it on the market as I love Strata and I've already built it anyway.
If Strata has a mission at all, it is to make multi-track frequency spectrum monitoring normal in music production.
At the moment, as far as I can tell, multi-track frequency spectrum monitoring plugins are an obscure niche of the audio plugin market, and hardly anyone uses them. I want to change all that! My hope is that Strata will make music producers realise how helpful it is to see the frequency spectrum of every track all at once, and will make it a normal routine part of their workflow.
I hope to achieve this by making multi-track frequency spectrum monitoring FUN by:
This is all basic stuff, but SO important!
I hope that by bringing this product to market, I can help music producers realise how helpful it is, and how much FUN it is to see all of the tracks in a song at once! I hope that Strata can become a normal part of producers' workflow.
— Ross Williams, Crickets Audio founder and creator of Strata, 26 October 2025.
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