Building a Home or Project Recording Studio – Part 2
In Part 2 of this article, we will focus only on Plugins.
Plugins comes in 2 flavors:
- Instrument Plugins
- Effect Plugins
The two flavors are Instruments and Effects. Instrument plugins can be synthesizers, virtual physical modelers, and sample players. Those are used to create synth sounds, drums, strings, bass, orchestral, piano sounds, and so on.
Effect plugins are usually inserted on an audio or instrument track, and it is used to treat the sound recorded or played back via MIDI on an instrument track. Those effects can be delays, reverbs, chorus, etc., as well as compression, limiters, EQs, etc. It can also be a hardware emulation of a mic pre or an entire channel strip of a console.
Universal Audio, a recording software and hardware manufacturer, provides a DSP based format called UAD-2, that releases VST, AU, AAX and RTAS formats of their plugins. They also have a format called Unison, which allows you to use one of their hardware audio interface (Apollo series) that allows you to provide a near zero latency connection to a Unison supported plugin, such as a Mic Pre, Channel Strip, Guitar and Bass Amps. Many of these Unison enabled plugins emulate some incredible hardware such as API, Fender, Manley, Marshall, Neve, SSL, UA’s own hardware, and more. It’s a format we love in our studios.
Plugins comes in 5 formats:
- VST – Virtual Studio Technology – PC and Mac
- VST3 – Virtual Studio Technology 3 – PC and Mac
- AU – Audio Units – Mac and iOS only
- AAX – Avid Audio eXtension – PC and Mac
- RTAS – Real Time AudioSuite – – PC and Mac
Let’s talk about VST and VST3. Both were created by Steinberg, VST in 1996, and later VST3, which are formats for running plugins on both Mac and PC. Steinberg completely rewritten VST3 to be more optimized and includes more functions.
AU or Audio Units were created by Apple as a plugin architecture for Core Audio on MacOS and iOS. It is a system level plugin architecture that uses a set of APIs to process streams of audio in real time.
AAX is an Avid created plugin format to support both their ProTools HDX (AAX DSP) and ProTools HD (AAX Native) formats and they support 64 bit versions of ProTools (v11 and later.)
RTAS was created by Digidesign, now Avid, as a plugin format for ProTools, but also can work for ProTools TDM and HD systems. Most RTAS plugins are supported on ProTools v10 and earlier, and most of the plugin developers have moved towards AAX.
So what does this all mean?
If you’re running a purely Windows/PC based studio setup, you are more than likely only going to be using VST/VST3 and maybe AAX if you are using ProTools HD or HDX.
If you’re running a purely MacOS based studio setup, you are more than likely going to be using your platform of choice of AU, VST and maybe AAX if you are using ProTools HD or HDX. Most of the MacOS based DAWs outside of Avid’s ProTools will support both AU and VST. Some plugins, though very rare, are better run as VST than AU, though both format exists from the same software publisher. Keep in mind, if you look at Part 1 of this article, Logic only supports AU plugins.
In Part 3, we will be talking about Audio Interfaces.
