Extreme validation, to an industry-grade bar.
A roadmap from the current gate suite to the rigor a top-tier plugin house ships behind: bit-transparent by construction, standards-compliant, real-time-safe, perceptually verified, and regression-locked across every format, host, and platform. Grounded in the 146-check harness, the strict end-to-end validator, and the 17-gate SibilanceEval rubric.
The bar
What industry grade means.
The bar is not a feeling about quality. It is a set of measurable properties, each with a standard behind it, that a plugin either meets or does not.
The five pillars
Where we are, and where it has to get to.
Every property above lives in one of five pillars. Each row is a metric with a definition, an honest read of where it stands today, the target, and the tool that settles it.
The two that matter most: a scoped allocation counter that asserts zero mallocs on the audio thread, and worst-case per-block timing held well under the buffer deadline. Everything else in real-time safety follows from those two holding.
Infrastructure
What makes it stick.
Gates only hold if the machinery around them holds. These are the practices that keep a green number green build after build.
Bit-for-bit
Store known-good outputs so any drift in the render fails the build, not a listening session.
Adversarial input
Random and hostile input to surface non-finite output and edge-case faults before a host does.
Invariants
Assert the rules that must always hold: determinism, the amount-0 null, monotonic depth.
Over time
Watch RTF and memory across builds so a regression reads as a trend, not a surprise.
Spread, not luck
Report distribution and confidence, so a passing number is the real cost, not one kind run.
Paths that matter
Keep the harness exercising the detection, protection and finishing paths under test.
Sequenced roadmap
Six steps, in order.
The order is deliberate: measurement before verification, correctness before coverage. Each step turns a target above into a gate that ships in CI.
- 01Standards metrics into SibilanceEvalWire BS.1770-4 loudness and true-peak and AES17 THD+N into the gated rubric.
- 02Performance & real-time safetyAdd the scoped allocation counter and worst-case per-block timing as hard gates.
- 03Regression lockdownGolden-reference renders, so any output change is caught bit-for-bit.
- 04Perceptual verificationPEAQ ODG on non-sibilant material, then a human ABX/MUSHRA panel.
- 05Host & format matrixauval and the VST3/CLAP validators in CI, across a scripted real-DAW checklist.
- 06Trend & detection rigorTrack benchmark trends and grow the detection corpus past 20 speakers.
No metric ships without a gate, no number without a measurement, full-chain RTF ≤ 3%/core, the UI untouched.