Four real, licensed recordings, four completely different mixing problems. Nothing is preloaded or autoplayed - press "Run through TAN" on each to hear the two-pass result for yourself, processed live in your browser.
Mostly original productions by the person who built TAN (released as vsprx / Ghostlight), across genres - hyperpop, dubstep, drum & bass, future garage, lo-fi, R&B, cinematic - plus a couple of Tom Lehrer songs and a Chopin nocturne. Modern productions are mastered hot but still swing hard: a hushed intro, then a wall-of-sound drop. TAN rides those within-track swings without flattening the production or squashing the parts you want loud. Pick a track and hear where it steps in.
Screaming stingers, blaring brass, and a narrator mixed hot, right up against dialogue and quiet dread that sit way down in the mono mix - decades before anyone normalized loudness at mastering time. This is the vintage-movie problem that started this whole project: the old stuff is exactly what modern gear handles worst.
The real game problem is dynamic range: you creep through quiet ambience, then a grenade goes off and it's deafening. The default clip is a string of explosions with silence between - TAN tames those concussion peaks so they stop being painful without killing the impact. Then switch to a chiptune for the flip side: already-flat audio comes out basically untouched. Restraint matters as much as leveling.
Unscripted conversation, no post-production riding the fader - one speaker leans into the mic, the other leans back, there's laughter and cross-talk. Nobody was evening this out in real time, which is exactly the kind of natural, human volume swing TAN is built to smooth over.