Strata is available at a special launch price of US$25 during December 2025. The standard price will be US$75.
Strata is a new product, and, as such doesn't have many users or user testimonials. For now, I am providing just a testimonial by myself!
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Date | 26 October 2025 |
| Country | Australia |
| DAW | Bitwig |
| Genres | EDM, Orchestral |
| Years making music | 8 |
| Years making Strata | 5 |
| Years using Strata | 5 |
Do you use Strata in every DAW project? Yes. Strata is in the project of every song I create.
Why do you use Strata? I use Strata because I want to know what's going on in my song!
Do you put Strata Track on every group or every track? It varies. Usually I put it on every track because that gives me the most detailed view. It doesn't cause my CPU to melt down unless it is a very large project, so I throw it on every track. But sometimes, I just throw it onto every group. If you've got fourteen violins all playing the same MIDI, it will only clutter the Strata Vision graph to put it on every violin! Sometimes I will use the realms feature to have two instances of Strata Vision, one providing a tracks view and one providing a groups view.
What do you like about Strata? I love how I can see everything that's going on in my song in one view! Well, not everything. Strata doesn't show you the stereo image information (unless you select Mid or Side mode), but just seeing the frequency spectrum of every track in your song gives you a huge sense of control. You can see what's going on and pick up problem, even if your ears don't! I also love all the colours.
What frustrates you about Strata? It's a little annoying to have yet another monitoring plugin on the end of every track. Sometimes when I find I have Strata plus Span plus Oszilloscope and so on on every track, I create a monitoring group and create a monitoring track for each track and put all the monitoring plugins there. That gets it out of the way of the main music tracks. But that's a lot more work, so I usually don't bother.
Has Strata every crashed on you? Yes, of course, all the time --- when I was writing it! But I've learned a lot about plugin stability in the last several years, and it's extremely stable now. Nowadays, it almost never crashes, and I know that because I use Bitwig and it does plugin sandboxing and tells me when Strata Track or Strata Vision has crashed.
What is your favourite Strata colour palette? I like the Rainbow colour palette best because it tends to provide the greatest colour difference between tracks. The Eiffel Studio palette is also beautiful.
What is your favourite Strata theme? I like the default "Strata" theme, but I would wouldn't I, because I created Strata. :-)
Do you have the track lists turned on? No. I turn the track list off and the dynamic track list off in my own projects to reduce clutter. They are on by default so that new users can see that the instances of Strata Track are connecting to the instance of Strata Vision.
How do you solve the fader problem in your own projects? I set all my faders to 0dB and never touch them. Instead, I place two "Tool" ("Utility" in Ableton) effects on each track, one to set the overall volume of the track, and the other to do volume automation. This works really well, and I never think about the fader problem any more.
How do you deal with return/FX tracks and Strata? I don't use return/FX tracks much in my own projects, but when I do, I either ignore them or put an instance of Strata on each return/FX track and monitor them like all the other tracks.
Has Strata ever melted down your CPU? Yes. In projects that are pushing the edge of what my computer can cope with, I have found that turning off Strata has sometimes been the difference between stuttering and smooth playing. But that's only when I get desperate. Usually it's saturation plugins that use lots of CPU and it's better to find them and turn them off first.
What is Strata most useful for? Strata is most useful for detecting that tracks are sounding in areas of the frequency spectrum that they shouldn't be. In particular, Strata is great for spotting tracks that are sounding down at the low end of the spectrum.
What is the most surprising thing that Strata alerted you to? I once dragged and dropped a high hat sample from a sample pack into a project and it sounded fine, but when I looked at the Strata graph, I saw to my shock that this high-hat sample actually had a lot going on under 100Hz!!! That was a huge wakeup call and I am far more careful about using sample packs now. It's also a huge lesson to me to keep an eye on the Strata graph to detect anything unusual going on. It's excellent for that.
Do you ever find Strata confusing? Sometimes I make the mistake of thinking there's a bump in one track's spectrum, when it's just a bump of one of the tracks underneath it! That's just the nature of the Strata graph though. Also, if I put it on too many individual instruments in an orchestral work, the graph can become a bit overcomplicated.
What other monitoring plugins do you use? I like iZotope Tonal Balance Control, Voxengo Span, Voxengo Correlometer, Schulz Audio Oszilloscope, and iZoptope Insight.
Would you buy Strata again? Well, I got it for free. :-)
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