Universal Audio's Ocean Way Studios for their UAD platform is a room emulation; this is the most basic fact when trying to describe the plug-in. But this simple description does a huge disservice to...
Mastering audio today involves more than just creating loud and exciting stereo music masters. The mastering engineer takes on the roles of quality control, metadata oversight, and of course,...
Full disclosure: I saw an introductory promotion offering the United Plugins FrontDAW plug-in for free, so I downloaded and registered it. The promotion has since expired, and the plug-in is now...
For years, I've been tortured by drum gates. First, in the analog realm, where I'd be mixing poorly-recorded tracks (sometimes my fault) and I'd attempt to use gates to add punch and clarity to my...
Bob Clearmountain [Tape Op #84, #129] is responsible for mixing some of rock music's most iconic records and happens to be one of my favorite mixing engineers of all time. So, when I heard Apogee had...
The eight reverb chambers built under the parking lot of the Capitol Records building in Los Angeles are some of the most highly revered, and closely guarded, environments for generating natural...
Hey, look! Unique low-latency plug-ins from Apogee Digital, the same folks that have brought us such stellar hardware interfaces over the years. Though it may strike some as a late entry into a...
MAAT's thEQorange is an update of the famous Algorithmix PEQ Orange linear EQ plug-in. The original Orange EQ (along with its Red sibling) were very popular with mastering houses. Users suggested that...
Dan Gillespie founded Newfangled Audio to merge his digital processing experience with his interest in machine learning. Drawing on 15 years of writing DSP code for Eventide, Elevate is a suite that...
Softube is one of the most acclaimed emulation developers, so it was a surprise that their release of the Weiss DS1-MK3 mastering compressor was not a model – it's a line-by-line source transfer...
Antares has just upped its game by releasing a lower-priced version of its Auto-Tune [Tape Op #126] line of pitch correction plug-ins called Auto-Tune Access. I have been a user of Auto-Tune since the...
There are plenty of great emulations of upscale vintage reverbs out there, from plates and chambers to coveted early digital units. While there is a time and a place for these elegant designs, many...
The debate between hardware versus plug-ins has cooled over the last couple years as plug-ins are getting better and better. However, Acustica Audio seems happy to stoke the fires with their El Rey...
