Noisebud have released Smile v5, available via Patreon.
What’s new in Smile v5:
- True phon-based EQ shaping, modeled after ISO226
- Transient-specific phon targeting – dial in a separate curve for transients
- Fletchy-Muncher is obsolete – Smile now includes everything Fletchy did, and more
Smile has always been a fun concept — it was one of the first plugins to use equal loudness contours and has probably been my most successful release to date. But let’s be honest: no one’s been raving about it in a while. Competing tools have caught up, and Noisebud stopped reaching for it years ago. That’s about to change. What started as a compatibility update turned into a full rebuild. Smile now calculates the exact contour for each phon level. While the plugin still produces a static EQ curve per setting, the bands are no longer linear — they now follow the true shape of the equal loudness curve at every step.
This makes Smile v5 useful outside the studio as well — for example, in live sound, when you soundcheck at lower levels (like in a restaurant that doesn’t want 100 dB SPL during dinner) and quickly want to adapt the sound to a new loudness level as the show starts. It’s also simply a more precise tool for mixing and mastering.
Version 5 introduces a completely new engine under the hood, built around phon-accurate loudness contour modeling. Instead of using approximations or static curves, Smile now calculates and adjusts the EQ response using a perceptual model based on actual phon levels, starting from a baseline of 80 phon.
You can shift the target between 72–88 phon. The result is a tonal shift that feels natural — not because it’s subtle, but because it aligns with how your ears actually work.
Our brains are hardwired to perceive some frequencies more clearly than others. Smile v5 embraces that fact and gives you a way to re-balance a mix according to how we hear, not just how it measures.
Smile v5 isn’t just a de-harsher — it’s a perceptual tone corrector. Whether you mix loud, quiet, or somewhere in between, this helps you get the tonal balance right for actual human ears.
Smile v5 is available to PC and Mac users (VST3 and AU).
For more information on Smile v5, click here:
NOTE: Some of the links you click on may be affiliated. Clicking and purchasing using these links helps support and fund The Beat Community. Thanks for your support.
