Something I do not put on the Goghini about page: I make music. Under the name Box of Rules I write bass-led rock, and when the writing stalls I build audio software instead, which is its own kind of procrastination with a nicer changelog.
Two of my worlds have now collided. Box of Rules and Goghini have made a plugin together, it is called Focus, it is free, and it does to a stereo mix exactly what our glasses do to a room.
The same idea, wearing ears instead of eyes
Focus Frames exist because of the edges. Forward vision was never my problem. The problem was everything arriving at the sides: the door swinging, the person crossing the room, the movement I never asked to process and could not stop processing. The shields quiet the edges so the middle can have your attention.
Sat at the desk one night, mixing, it occurred to me that a stereo mix has edges too. All the width lives out at the sides, and the thing you actually want people to hear, the voice, the snare, the bass, sits in the middle. Same shape of problem. So I built the same shape of fix.
Focus has one dial, labelled REMOVE PERIPHERALS. Turn it up and the sides close in while the mono middle steps forward, and you watch it happen: black shutters slide in from both edges of the window as the waveform tidies itself from ragged noise into one calm line. It is the glasses, drawn as software. Four MOODs decide how the shields close.
- QUIET, which just takes the sides down and touches nothing else.
- CALM, where the image narrows but the room stays as loud.
- PRESENT, which brings the middle forward as the sides go.
- DEEP, where the low end folds to mono first and the top end goes last.
At zero it does nothing at all, deliberately, and it only ever loads on stereo tracks, because a mono track has no peripherals to remove. That felt like the honest way to build it.
Then a stranger reviewed it
Focus went up on KVR Audio, which is where the audio world goes to find plugins and, frequently, to be unkind about them. Yesterday it picked up its first review. Five stars.
I both laugh so much at your designs and absolutely love them. I'm really glad I discovered you.
epack2, KVR Audio, 12 August 2026
I have read it an embarrassing number of times. Building things for neurodivergent brains mostly happens in private, on the assumption that if it helps me it might help somebody else, and you rarely get to hear back. Someone downloaded a free plugin from a name they had never seen, understood the joke and the point of it, and then went to the trouble of writing that down.
It is free, and it stays free
No account, no licence key, no dongle, and you can use it on commercial work. It runs as VST3, AU and LV2 on Mac, Windows and Linux, and it adds no latency, so it is safe to leave on while you record.
The glasses pay the bills. The plugin is the same idea offered to anyone with a pair of speakers, and I would rather it travelled than earned.
There is a version of this story where the glasses and the band stay in separate rooms and never mention each other. I tried that for a while. It turns out the thing I keep making, whichever tools happen to be on the desk, is the same thing: quiet the edges, so the middle gets through. One idea, two senses, and now you can have the loud half for nothing.
