Plug-ins

Middle & Sides processing offers unique mastering possibilities, such as the ability to de-ess a centrally panned vocal without affecting panned cymbal sounds. Brainworx's new plug-in combines an innovative M&S matrix with mastering-quality EQ and processing.

•Rob Papen Albino 3 •SSL Drumstrip •Starplugs Admiral

If you want other people to hear your surround mixes, you'll need to encode them into a consumer format. Pro Tools users have a choice of software for this purpose. Which should you choose?

• Xponaut Voice Tweaker 4; Waves Maxx Volume • Noveltech Vocal Enhancer

Mastering engineers are notoriously fussy about EQ, and until now, plug-in manufacturers have struggled to compete with the best hardware designs. Can Algorithmix's Red and Blue change hearts and minds?

There are now quite a few plug-ins on the market that have the ability to split audio into hundreds or thousands of bands and treat them separately, paving the way for a variety of weird and wonderful effects. Are you brave enough to enter the frequency zone?

Auto-Tune has been the industry standard pitch-correction tool for many years, and version 5 introduces many new features, but it faces its strongest competition yet from the new plug-in version of Celemony's Melodyne. So which one should you buy?

McDSP's Project Studio Bundle provides an affordable way for Pro Tools users to get their hands on versions of all the company's acclaimed effects and processors.

Line 6 first made their name with the Amp Farm plug-in, but since then they've concentrated on hardware products, and Gearbox Plug-in makes their latest range of amp and effects emulations available in a plug-in for the first time.

Another bunch of enticing plug-ins get the full-blown insert treatment and rough handling to see how they perform.

Which effects and processing plug-ins do the Sound On Sound staff and product reviewers love the best? We asked, they answered...

Giga Virtual Instrument gives you Tascam's Giga sampling engine as a plug-in for the first time.

Can an 8 Megabyte plug-in really compete with the new generation of multi-Gigabyte sampled grand pianos?

Another batch of hot plug-ins get installed and tested.

McDSP's compression and EQ designs offer a huge amount of control with the potential for accurate emulation of vintage devices. Throw in a tape-modelling suite and a powerful multi-band compressor, and you have the Classic Pack.

A new drum-based instrument from Digidesign combines instant gratification with a huge sound library and plenty of potential for editing.

This new software instrument majors on lively and evocative loops and phrases that can be flexibly combined to create convincing world-music atmospheres.

Most guitar amp modellers can be pressed into service on bass guitar, but now IK Multimedia have teamed up with Ampeg to create a plug-in dedicated to recreating bass amp sounds.

Old synths never die, they get reproduced as virtual instruments. So it is with Waldorf's Micro Q, which forms the heart of Terratec's impressive wavetable-based soft synth.

• WWYAM NWEQ Pro• Universal Audio Neve 1073 Equaliser

With their Vocal Bundle, Waves look to take voice processing and automatic pitch correction to a new level of sophistication.