Digidesign AIR Flanger

This review if for Digidesign's AIR (Advanced Instrument Research) Flanger. If you have Pro Tools 8, you probably already know that AIR plug-ins are a suite plug-ins that come free with Pro Tools 8, including this one. To me, if you don't have Pro Tools 8 yet it is worth it for these new useful plug-ins alone. You don't need to do anything in terms of installation once you've installed Pro Tools 8, as it will take care of it during the initial process. Using the AIR Flanger isn't by any stretch a hard thing to do. As long as you understand what the parameters do, you've good to go. The parameters that you have include those for rate, depth, feedback, and mix, as well as sections for flanger, an LFO, and a low cut equalizer. The flanger section contains only a parameter for pre delay, and the LFO has just a wave type selector and an L/R Offset. I was pretty familiar with these parameters going in, so I didn't need any help figuring it out. A manual however isn't made for this plug-in as far as I know.

SUITABILITY/PERFORMANCE

I'm running the Digidesign AIR Flanger plug-in on my home system where I recently upgraded to Pro Tools LE 8 from 7.4. I run Pro Tools LE 8 on a Mac Book Pro that has as 2.2 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 4 GB of RAM. Within this configuration, Pro Tools runs with a Digi 002R audio interface. Thus far I've only had a need to try out the AIR Flanger on a single track at a time with a single session, so I can't say how well it will run if you want to run a bunch of them at a time. However, these AIR plug-ins are designed to only take up a small bit of processing power.

OVERALL OPINION

I can't ever say a bad thing about a free plug-in, so I won't start here. In fact, I actually really like using AIR Flanger. I find it easy to use and I also find that it is capable of getting a very wide palette of different flanging tones. It has a clean tone overall, but like most plug-ins it lacks the body and fullness that you'd get with an analog flanger. So while not my favorite sounding flanger out there, in most situations it will be good enough to get the job done without a doubt. The only place that you can get the Digidesign AIR Flanger is with Pro Tools 8, so if you've got an earlier version of the software, I'd highly recommend taking the plunge into Pro Tools 8 so you can get this one for free in addition to all the other ones you'll get.