Plug-ins; Adobe Premiere

Here's an audio file which has been reversed using one of the default Premiere plug‑ins. I've always had a soft spot for reversed cymbals!

Martin Russ brings you more information about Mac plug‑ins, and downloads two Software Development Kits.

Last month I started looking at plug‑Ins, but managed to avoid mentioning any real specifics. This month, I'll dig a little deeper into the subject, on the assumption that the more you know about plug‑ins, the better you will be able to use them.

I mentioned last month that plug‑ins were developed as a way of allowing application programmers to concentrate on core functionality, so that they could leave the more peripheral additional functions to third‑party developers. Several different formats of audio plug‑in have been available for the Mac in recent years, so let's take a brief look at the major players.

Formats

Would you like to navigate through all these folders each time you acquire a new plug‑in? An ideal case for an alias. In this case, there is already an alias to the Adobe Premiere folder, and so you need to go there and make another alias, and then drag that alias to your preferred location — normally the digital audio application's home folder.

Some of the first audio plug‑ins that escaped from their parent application and found their way into other applications were from an unexpected source: Adobe Premiere. Premiere is regarded as a video editing tool nowadays, but even on the early versions, a few plug‑ins which worked on audio were hidden amongst all the video filters for tweaking pictures and wiping between images. Initially, the audio processors were simple, allowing you to play something backwards, or copy a mono track to one side of a stereo pair. But as time went by, more sophisticated functions began to appear, and a few other programs started to offer the same internal interfacing so that they could use the same plug‑ins: BIAS's Peak and Deck are two examples.

At the opposite end of the plug‑in spectrum to Premiere is Digidesign's professional TDM format for audio processing plug‑ins, which has also been around for many years (in fact it started when you needed 'farms' of DSP processing power to process audio in anything like real time). Premiere plug‑ins don't work in real time, which doesn't stop them from being very useful, but affects their immediacy (obviously). In contrast, TDM plug‑ins can process live audio as it happens, just like hardware processors and effects units. Real‑time processing of audio requires a different style of programming interface — you need to be able to cope with continuous streams of audio data instead of a more constrained audio file — but the advantage is that the plug‑ins can be regarded more as conventional outboard effects/processing equipment, and less as a time‑consuming post‑processing operation.

Although the urge to collect plug‑ins may be strong, as with all computer‑based activities, less is usually more, and so filling hard disks and memory with plug‑ins that you never use may well be counter‑productive.

There are two other widespread formats for audio plug‑ins worth mentioning. The AudioSuite format has its roots in Digidesign, but was also used by Emagic's Logic Audio. The last is currently the most widespread, despite being a late entry into the field: Steinberg's VST format, which also offers real‑time processing. Today, TDM remains the pro choice, and AudioSuite and Premiere continue, but have really been overshadowed by the VST format. This is due in no small part to both the tremendous success of Cubase VST, and the fact that Steinberg have now made the software development kit (SDK) for VST plug‑ins freely available. Unsurprisingly, this has resulted in a large number of freeware and shareware plug‑ins appearing alongside the commercial offerings. Now, other sequencers (such as Logic and Opcode's Studio Vision) have started to support VST plug‑ins as well (and Steinberg's ASIO audio card drivers). The second major release of the VST SDK should be available by the time you read this, and adds a number of new features which enhance the potential of plug‑ins, such as support for MIDI events, which opens up more possibilities for event‑controlled changes (like LFOs which are synchronised to MIDI Clock, or plug‑in synth emulations). Given the range of human ingenuity, there should be lots of new and innovative plug‑ins to spice up the host of existing reverbs, echoes and EQs available.

Remember that you should audition plug‑ins carefully to check their compatibility, reliability and audio quality before you commit to using them on a major project. Although the urge to collect plug‑ins may be strong, as with all computer‑based activities, less is usually more, and so filling hard disks and memory with plug‑ins that you never use may well be counter‑productive. Choose a set that achieves what you want, and only selectively change it, rather as you might choose new pieces of hardware.

Plug‑in Access

Conventional serial and AppleTalk/ LocalTalk printer support is now available with the Griffin Technology iPort.

In the past, I've suggested that you put suitably named aliases for project folders into the home folders of applications — that way the project folders are the first destinations that appear in a Save dialogue box. To continue this month's plug‑In theme, I suggest you put aliases to plug‑in folders in places where it will be easy to drop newly acquired plug‑ins. I'm a great believer in the old maxim that 'the harder something is to do, the easier it is to put it off' — and you might be surprised at the number of people who have multiple copies of files on their machines because they couldn't remember where they installed the last set.

So, set up aliases for any deeply nested (ie. inaccessible) folders in a prominent location, like the home folder for the application. In the case of Premiere plug‑ins, this often means making an alias to the 'Premiere' folder inside the Extensions folder, which is in turn inside the System folder — but the details depend on where your digital audio application expects to find its plug‑ins (you can also try, as I have done, placing aliases to your plug‑ins in the folder where your audio application expects to see them, which allows you to keep the actual plug‑in files elsewhere, but sometimes this doesn't work, because your audio application expects to find a real plug‑in instead of an alias to one). This is the sort of concept that works much better in a diagram, and even better on your Mac!