In line with the uses of the original hardware, this is gold on buses and mixes in particular, creating solidity and cohesion without sacrificing transients. 30 day demos are available for most things.Īnother fine graphical rendering backed up by a classy sonic character, this is an emulation of Manley Labs’ pricey Vari Mu compressor limiter, and it sounds fantastic. Particular favourites are the ‘Ultramarine’ Fairchild and tube EQ emulation, and the ‘Ivory’ mastering EQ and compressor, but there’s something for everyone if you have the computer to handle it.
The EQs in particular have that certain ‘something’ that makes you feel like you’re using hardware, but the compressors too breathe in a way that is more ‘real’ than most software. It is easy to imagine that because they have fancy graphic renderings that maybe they lack in the audio department, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. They have always been very demanding on the CPU due to the vast amount of computations necessary, but the trade-off is a truly beautiful sound quality. One of these is the world of Acustica Audio’s convolution-based hardware emulation plugins. I finally replaced my 12 year old Mac Pro this year which means that certain new vistas have opened up. Reflecting my increased interest in this, and the progress made by software makers in coding ‘analogue’ behaviour into their plugins, the list will lean heavily towards EQ, compression and pre-amp emulation.
I have recently been focussing much more on mixing and mastering. It is now 4 years since my last one so it seems a good time to revisit the best audio plugins and software tools currently available.
I have occasionally written blog posts on my favourite software tools, working out to be every 4 years or so.
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