The Waves Ltd. X-Crackle plug-in is one that is found in the Waves Restoration bundle and is specifically designed to remove unwanted crackle sounds from vinyl and other recordings that need to be restored. You can only buy this plug-in in this or another fully packed Waves bundle. I have the full Waves Complete bundle, which includes every plug-in that Waves has including all of those in the Restoration bundle. You install all of the plug-in at once, so there's nothing specific to say about installing this one as opposed to the others in the bundle as it's all one process that should be easy enough to complete without issues. Each of the plug-ins has it's own purpose, so it's definitely a good idea to look at the entire bundle and not just this one plug-in when thinking about these Waves Restoration tools. Using X-Crackle is really simple, more so than most of the others in the Restoration bundle. It's just got parameters for threshold and reduction (crackle reduction), and audio and difference output monitoring choices. It also has attenuation and stereo output metering in addition the in depth graph that shows you where in the spectrum the crackle sound is happening. I haven't seen the manual for this plug-in...

SUITABILITY/PERFORMANCE

I'm running the Waves Ltd. X-Crackle plug-in and the full Waves Restoration bundle on my home system, which is Pro Tools LE 8 based. I run Pro Tools LE with a Digi 002R audio interface and run everything on a Mac Book Pro lap top. The computer is running with a 2.2 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 4 GB of RAM. This has definitely been an adequate enough system for me to run this plug-in without hiccups. I haven't used the X-Crackle plug-in as much as I have some of the others in the bundle, and when I have it has only been one instance at a time.

OVERALL OPINION

The Waves Ltd. X-Crackle plug-in is the best of it's kind that I've used, removing unwanted crackling more smoothly and more accurately than any other device or plug-in that I've used before. This one is really specific to removing crackle, which is most useful when restoring recordings from vinyl, but the others in the bundle can be used more flexibly. If you're looking for some plug-ins to help you clean up some old recordings of any kind, or for simple noise reduction, the Waves Ltd. X-Crackle plug-in and the full Restoration bundle of software is the way to go, as you aren't going to fine a more in depth selection of plug-ins for this purpose.