How is Tim Exile’s Finalist different from the average instant mastering solution?£99 (£69 introductory price), timexile.com
Since 2009, British electronic musician and software developer Tim Exile has shifted from collaborating with Native Instruments on standout Reaktor projects such as The Finger, The Mouth, and Flesh to building his own brand, offering both creative and functional solutions for independent musicians.

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As with many great inventions, necessity was Finalist’s main inspiration. The idea came when an engineer friend of Tim’s expressed a desire for a way to deliver a cohesive mix quickly after a long day of recording. This sparked a journey that would take three years to complete, ironing out the creases and developing a fun and inspiring interface with esteemed user-experience designer, Efflam Le Bivic, known best for his work with Native Instruments.
Finalist allows you to process up to 32 stereo WAV files and sort them into five different categories. This allows you to determine the amount of processing being applied to these different areas of your mix, and there are also global Cleanup and Master processors that shape the entire mix.

Once the Finalist has analyzed your stems, you can then choose between a range of different processing character presets. This easy, one-click step is crucial because you’re matching the mixing style with the music genre you’re working with. You can choose between more neutral or more eccentric processing styles, but you’ll usually end up narrowing it down to two or three presets that help the track come alive in different ways.
When you’ve settled on a sound characteristic, you can make adjustments to the core sectors of your mix by selecting a processing style on each module, increasing or decreasing the amount of processing, and making gain adjustments. Naturally, because all the real magic happens in the backend, there are a few tricks and precautionary measures to take to achieve the best results.
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How does Finalist actually work?
While Tim Exile may have created Finalist with the landscape of instant AI mastering tools in the backdrop, there is no sign of AI here. Instead, Finalist gets its bearings by analysing 300 data points, which are then mapped onto the different parts of the mixing engine according to the preset you’ve selected.
In the mixing engine, Finalist applies a range of processes depending on the presets you have active on each module. This includes multiband compression, saturation, and mid-side processing, which are controlled through dynamic rather than static data feedback. That means Finalist is constantly getting readings and readjusting to the different sections of the track.
While this sounds impressive on paper, you really have to hear it to believe it. For me, the immediate ‘wow’ factor can be attributed to the way Finalist instantly handles the core elements of my mix. The kick and bass are locked into place cohesively, vocals are pushed forward, and the levels of the supporting instruments in the reverberant field are balanced astonishingly. These are tasks that beginners tend to struggle with and can even trouble the professionals, depending on the mix. Then, with the ability to change the presets on each of the individual Drums, Bass, Backing, Lead, Aux, and Master modules, you can quickly improve the separation with contrasting shaping and texture.
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How do I get the best results with Finalist?
The gain structure of the stems you import plays a big role in the Finalist process. If, for instance, your drum stems are already correctly gained, the engine has no problem prioritising the key elements, even with multiple layers of kick and snare samples. Alternatively, if your stems are all at the same gain level with little headroom, it’ll be more difficult for the engine to build the necessary hierarchy for each group of sounds.
If you really want to get the best from Finalist, then approaching it like an external summing engine would be the best bet. Rather than feeding in 30 stems, by pre-mixing five sets of stems in your DAW and preparing them for the corresponding modules in Finalist, you take out a lot of the guesswork. This frees you up creatively to focus on fine-tuning the mix according to taste rather than fighting with individual instruments in a cycle of soloing and muting.
Although Finalist does run standalone through Reaktor Player, I find the export process clunky compared to working within Cubase. If you have a folder with multiple batches of stems, your workflow can be relatively rapid, especially if the songs are going on the same EP. As you load the next stem set, the modules remain the same, so you can make the individual adjustments you need to each track while maintaining the same aesthetic for that cohesive, album-like sound.
One issue I notice is that if you only have one or two stems running through a particular module, the processing can be too pronounced, which can force certain elements to jump out of the mix in a rather jarring way. This can be countered with some good-ol’ mix engineer’s thinking, by placing the elements within a larger group according to the frequency they occupy. In this new context, the badly behaved sounds are far more predictable and easily controlled.
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Is Finalist an essential audio tool?
The one part of music production where Finalist can certainly aid is any process that relies on collaboration. Whether it’s the back and forth of ideas between a recording engineer or producer and a client, or between band members, the ability to have a musical sketch immediately sound more like the finished article could easily become invaluable.
While having to run the plugin inside Reaktor may be a little fiddly at first, any misgivings quickly dissolve as soon as you become immersed in Finalist’s well-designed interface.
While there is still no substitute for manual mixing, Finalist is still an extremely useful shortcut for the uninitiated and experienced alike. In fact, you can even use it as a bus processor for quickly enhancing channel groups such as drums, bass, vocals, guitars, or synths within your usual mixing workflow.

Key features

Stem mixing plugin
Runs within NI Reaktor (VST, AU, AAX, or standalone in Reaktor Player)
Import up to 32 stereo stems
5 processing modules and master bus module
40 processing presets in 5 categories
Cleanup module for mix separation

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