MEDIA ASSISTANCE
 AUDIO PLUG-INS PACK 1 (WIN)

High-quality effects plug-ins, but with a high-price

by Scott R. Garrigus

  Created by French programmer Vincent Burel, Audio Plug-ins Pack 1 from Media Assistance is a bundle of four high-quality plug-ins provided in both the DirectX and VST formats. This twin-format design means that you can run these plug-ins with just about any PC-based host application. Three of the plug-ins offer traditional processing functions: compression/limiting, equalization, and reverb. The fourth one lets you “chain” the other plug-ins together as you would when patching the signal from one hardware-based effects unit to another. All of the plug-ins are intuitive and easy to use, except perhaps the reverb, which offers an impressive array of parameters that makes it seem a bit overwhelming at first.

I tested Audio Plug-ins Pack 1 on a Pentium II/300 MHz machine with 64 MB of RAM and Windows 98SE. I tried the plug-ins with a variety of host applications, including Cakewalk’s Pro Audio, Sonic Foundry’s Sound Forge, and Steinberg’s WaveLab. All four plug-ins performed without a hitch, and they were actually fun to work with.

In Common
Fig. 1

FIG. 1: FFX-16 lets you chain together any DirectX plug-ins to achieve multi-effects processing. (click image.)
Like many plug-ins, these resemble hardware-based units; to change parameter settings or modes of operation, you twiddle onscreen knobs and buttons. Fortunately, this isn’t the only input method. By right-clicking on any adjustable parameter (usually a knob), you can open a menu that offers a number of other input options. For example, you can quickly set a parameter to its maximum or minimum value or to a number of other common values (shown as a list). Most important, you can enter a precise value directly from the computer keyboard.

The documentation for Audio Plug-ins Pack 1 is a 42-page, spiral-bound booklet that covers the software reasonably well (although the translation from German is filled with editing mistakes). The manual lacks tutorials, but it does provide a description of each plug-in along with all parameters, and it even includes the specifications for the different operational modes of the EQ and reverb modules. The documentation is also provided on the CD-ROM in PDF format. Unfortunately, no Help files are included with the software.

Patchwork Quilt
 FFX-16 is a plug-in manager and virtual patch bay/rack that lets you route the audio signal through a series of plug-ins and then save the “virtual-rack” setup as a preset (see Fig. 1). For example, you can chain together the limiter, EQ, and reverb plug-ins and listen to the audio being processed in real time. Moreover, FFX-16 works with any DirectX plug-ins, not just the ones included in Audio Plug-ins Pack 1.

Each of the rack’s plug-ins includes a solo and mute button. You can change the position of a plug-in within the rack (which changes its location in the chain) by simply dragging and dropping the plug-in label with your mouse. You can also rapidly switch between different variations of your rack setup using the eight memory store and recall buttons.

As you add plug-ins to the rack, the corresponding editing windows appear onscreen. Arranging the windows is easy with buttons that tile, cascade, minimize vertically, minimize all, open all, and close all windows. Peak meters let you see the level of the signal coming into and going out of the rack. You can even create racks and add them to other racks for more complex setups. (By the time you read this, a free update should be available that lets you save presets of individual plug-ins apart from the rack or host program.)


Reprinted with permission from Magazine, December, 2000
© 2000, Intertec Publishing, A Primedia Company All Rights Reserved


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