Music Software guides & articles

Most software reverbs offer a choice of halls, plates, rooms and other types of virtual spaces, but Valhalla DSP takes a different approach. The company has separated its reverb offerings into indivi…

When the original Magic A/B came out a couple of years ago, I was pretty blown away by it, because it made the important process of A/B-ing a mix a lot easier. Now SampleMagic has rewritten the appli…

Your DAW is your most important piece of software — the heart of your studio. Most DAWs offer a lot of features that you can customize to fit your taste and the way you work. Since you use your DAW s…

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are back with a vengeance, with manufacturers and developers knocking down the prices of countless virtual instruments, effects, sound banks, and even audio hardware, wi…

To help you avoid making music that sounds like everyone else’s, I want to tell you about some premium-quality soft synths you may not know about. Although none of these instruments are terribly obsc…

From EchoBoy to FilterFreak to Crystallizer, Decapitator and more, Soundtoys plug-ins are super-creative tools that offer users the potential to take their music to new sonic places The new Soundtoys…

We all know that reverb is one of the staple effects in a mixer's toolkit. In fact, you'd be hard pressed to find a recording or live mix without at least some reverb in it. But does getting a good r…

Life as a writer for Audiofanzine has its pros and cons...Granted, if you're into audio, spending most of your days testing and reviewing the latest gear from the audio world can be really gratifying…

I’m often surprised by musicians who use their mice or trackpads to change MIDI software parameters, and then complain that they miss using real knobs and buttons. I’m surprised because they could us…

In this, the penultimate installment in our series discussing the consequences of volume on music, sound and human ears, we look at tools for measuring loudness.

Do you know what ice cream and compressors have in common? Both are better when you have a choice of flavors. FabFilter’s new Pro C-2 is a veritable ice cream store of compression, offering eight d…

When you're editing in Pro Tools, whether it's Pro Tools 12 or an older version, you won't get far if you don't understand how the edit modes and the main editing tools work. In this video we'll expl…

Hive, the latest instrument from u-he, does not claim the precision of Diva the richness of Zebra 2, or the modularity of Bazille or Ace. No. Hive looks and feels simple, is easy to use, and provides…

Melodyne Essential is the least expensive version of Celemony's acclaimed editing software, and though it doesn't have the same feature set of its big brother Melodyne Editor, it's nevertheless quite…

Studio One users have been awaiting a major upgrade for quite some time. Studio One 3 is the first such update since October of 2011, when Studio One 2 hit the market. PreSonus has added new instrume…

It's been more than a year and a half since Sonar X3 came out and, keeping up with the usual update schedule, the newest version was launched last January.

You often hear that a $1,000 laptop today has the power of a billion dollars worth of computer equipment from 50 years ago. Likewise, the equivalent of thousands of dollars of vintage synthesizer gea…

The competition in the amp-and-effects modeling market is fierce, and there is no shortage of excellent products. Positive Grid, which established itself on the iOS side with JamUp and JamUp Pro, and…

When you think of spring reverb, the sound that probably comes to mind is the “boingy” one associated with guitar amps. For mixing sources like vocals, drums and pianos, you probably wouldn't conside…

The drum instrument market is a crowded one, and already full of excellent choices. East West, a company renowned for its high-quality instruments and sound libraries, has just thrown its hat in the …

Some people become addicted to plug-ins; others become connoisseurs. That is, they're borderline addicts but too refined to splurge on just anything. They need a certain something, which is what the…

Subscription-based plans are becoming more common for music software. While presumably a good thing for the developers, they’re not necessarily so great for users, who have to pay over and over for a…

You all know what it's like to finish a mix that sounds amazing on your headphones and then try to show it to your grandma on her hi-fi system, only to discover that it sounds terrible. The mix is co…

There are lots of software solutions for live performance. Strangely enough, Sensomusic's Usine Hollyhock II doesn't come up on the radar as often as other products. And yet...

Universal Audio just released a new version of its software for Apollo and other UAD-2 devices. The release is highlighted by three new plug-ins, including spot-on emulations of the Neve 88RS Channel…