Nugen Audio Celebrates 20-Year Anniversary

Leeds, UK-based audio editing plug-in developer Nugen Audio will be celebrating its 20th anniversary at IBC 2024 in Amsterdam in mid-September.

Founded by an acclaimed DJ/EDM producer and the lead programmer of a top UK game development company, Nugen Audio first launched with stereo-image-related plug-ins for music production. Today, the brand has expanded to include award-winning loudness metering/correction, surround sound, mixing/mastering, tracking and audio analysis tools that are used by some of the world’s top names in post-production, broadcast and music.

“I co-founded Nugen Audio in 2004 with the goal of changing the world of audio,” says Dr. Paul Tapper, Nugen Audio CEO and co-founder. Tapper began his career as a lead programmer at Runecraft and worked as a lead programmer for Team 17 Digital from 2003-2010, while simultaneously creating tools for Nugen Audio. Today, in addition to his executive role with Nugen, Tapper runs the new immersive gaming brand Fruity Systems.

Tapper developed many of the original algorithms that form the basis of Nugen Audio’s products, including loudness metering and correction, DynApt, upmixing and True Peak limiting. “I am thrilled to have created a brand that has not only become a ‘household’ name in our industry, but that has grown so impressively over the past 20 years. I look forward to what our team will accomplish in the next two decades,” he says. 

“The goal is always to enhance users’ lives—either by making existing challenges easier to overcome, such as with the VisLM loudness meter, which has become an industry standard, or by producing new and exciting possibilities to ignite the imagination, like upmixing to immersive audio with Halo Upmix or the ground-breaking new reverb technology in Paragon,” says Charles Blessing, Nugen Audio CTO. “We continually endeavor to identify product categories that are either new or currently under-served, and then strive to create the most practically useful solutions in those categories to ensure our customers can run successful and effective businesses themselves.”