What kind of plugins does digital performer use

Once you try it, you'll wonder how you lived without it. There's a demo version there too. DP reflects the folder structure of the MAS plug-ins folder in its insert pop-up menus, allowing potentially huge lists of plug-ins to be easily navigated.

There's a logic to how plug-ins and virtual instruments appear in pop-up menus in DP, and knowing about it can help you to keep large collections easy to work with. For example, these days I put my individual MAS plug-ins in folders named after their manufacturers.

Each folder then causes a manufacturer sub-menu to be displayed when I'm navigating DP pop-up menus. Audio Units are not so easy. They'll also often appear grouped into sub-menus in DP's pop-ups, but the grouping occurs because DP reads manufacturer information embedded into the Audio Unit components themselves, rather than any folder hierarchy in OS X.

If you're of a programming disposition and a complete anorak this information is easy enough to edit. If not, I wouldn't worry about it; life's way too short! The worst side-effect of just leaving things be is a few ungrouped AU stragglers at the top of your pop-up lists. For VST plug-ins, grouping is dependent on which wrapper system you use. There's an old saying that if something's good it's worth waiting for. It was announced at the yes, !

It was clearly always in the pipeline — references to it showed up in the DP5 User Guide and in the promotional material of French co-developers Ultimate Soundbank. But it wasn't until mid-July this year that MOTU finally put everyone out of their misery and officially launched the update on www.

AudioFinder's Plug-in Manager is an elegant solution to maintaining plug-in sets for different purposes and applications. The original MachFive claimed to be the 'universal sampler', but version 2 ups the ante: MOTU claim it's the "complete solution for sample-library playback and sound design". It apparently opens and reads all major sampler library and audio-file formats directly, so no prior conversion stage is required, and CDs in sampler manufacturers' proprietary formats, which would otherwise be unreadable on a Mac or PC, can be 'seen' and loaded.

More up-to-date formats, such as EXS24, Kontakt and GigaSampler are compatible too, and programmable rule-based layering provides support for their sophisticated articulation and keyswitching systems. All this provides pretty phenomenal across-the-board compatibility, but clearly a line has to be drawn somewhere: don't expect extensively scripted Kontakt 2 patches to be read perfectly, for instance. MachFive 2 also offers an unlimited number of multitimbral parts for each instance, a built-in part mixer with metering and effects inserts, time-stretching and pitch-shifting along with so-called LoopLab beat-slicing , extensive full-screen sample and patch browser, flexible built-in effects architecture, surround sound support and multiple audio outputs.

Less expected, perhaps, are the modular synthesis architecture, with both vintage synth-style oscillators and drawbar-organ tone source, and the multi-point, tempo-syncable envelope generators.

MachFive 2 is clearly more than just a sampler. MachFive 2's bundled sound library is still an unknown, of course, but it at least looks promising. It's supplied as four DVDs containing 32Gb of samples. The first promises something akin to a 'workstation' sound set — pianos, organs, guitars, strings, brass, wind, synths, ethnic instruments and drum loops and kits. The third DVD offers high-resolution and surround sound samples of electric piano, guitars and bass, drum kits and percussion, amongst others.

For many DP users, upgrading to MachFive 2 will be a no-brainer. As I've mentioned many times before in Performer Notes, effects and virtual instruments plug-ins available in DP's native MAS format are preferable by far when it comes to long-term stability and reliability.

Having said all this, MachFive 2 has come very late to the party and a good number of its potential buyers, especially those who have upgraded to Intel-based Macs, have already committed to its main rival, Native Instruments' Kontakt 2. This sampler has a proven track record of reliability with DP, and is undoubtedly a hugely powerful instrument, which can also load pretty much any sample library on the planet. This brings up the oddities in DP's implementation of both platforms?

No other DAW I know of asks for one to be primary? Mac Pro 12 core 3. Re: VST vs Audiounits Post by James Steele » Sun Apr 13, am supersonic wrote: I am in the middle of an interesting conversation with a developer of the MeldaProduction plugs-in which I am very fond of and after a few recent hick-ups with the latest updates concerning the AU version of the plug-ins he has admitted it is not the most comfortable format to work with.

I think the freebies are in VST format also. One of the quirks of DP is that once up you use a plug-in in given format and change it in the plug-ins manager to another, it will still be looking for the other format used in a project and report it missing.

It would be cool if it simply recognized the new format and load the plug in as if nothing happened. I gather it's slightly more sophisticated, have a few features that AU doesn't have though probably because of that, no one implements them. I'm kind of shocked that there haven't been a few bumps in the road. I've been subtly avoiding it just because it's new and untested. However, I have never had any issues with any VSTs DP Benchmark comparison tests would be a waste of time.

How many AU's can you run at a time? It depends on which ones you're using. Who cares. Mac Pro 2. It may not be a big enough point to fret about, but there can be such a thing as an objectively better or worse standard. The idea is that DP calculates playback of processed disk audio and instrument tracks before playback begins, though whether it's really doing an invisible background 'freeze' or is effectively using a colossal buffer size is harder to fathom.

But who are we to worry? The result is that DP6 can play back, apparently with the greatest of ease, complex sequences that would otherwise have your Mac on its knees. To get the best out of pre-rendering and pre—gen, here are a few tips. You'll never benefit from look-ahead processing unless it's turned on, so do this by opening the Preferences window from the Digital Performer menu, or with the Command-comma shortcut and choosing the Audio Plug-ins pane.

There you can make settings for the current project and for future new projects, and the 'Pre-gen mode when possible' option turns everything on. Pre-gen works when plug-in and instrument windows are closed, because only then can DP stop having to worry about responding to real-time parameter changes and start doing its background thing.

You just have to get into the habit of closing windows the Command-W keyboard shortcut comes in handy here after instantiating a plug-in or tweaking one already in the sequence.

Some multitimbral, multi-channel virtual instruments such as MachFive 2, for instance can support dozens or even hundreds of simultaneous parts, and pre-gen will work for them just as well as it does for simpler, single-channel instruments. But consider what happens when you're actively building up a multi-layered arrangement using this type of instrument.

To allow you to play even a single part live from a record-enabled MIDI track , DP has to run the plug-in live too — ie. And then, since the summed audio output from the instrument can't be predicted ahead of time, the CPU-saving, behdind-the-scenes bounce can't take place.

So while pre—gen might theoretically allow a multitimbral instrument to play back literally hundreds of parts with little CPU use, you'd still need a powerful Mac to support those parts in real time as you recorded a new one. The solution here is to use multiple instances of the same instrument. This way, when you're actively playing in parts in one of them and CPU use starts to get a bit high, its window can be closed, it'll be pre-rendered and a new instance can be used for the next roundof real-time playing and layering.

When that one causes too much CPU hit, close it, create another instance, and repeat Even when DP6 is set to use 'Pre-gen mode when possible', individual plug-ins and instruments can override the setting. The windows' mini-menus give the option to 'Run this instance in real-time' or even to 'Default to real-time' for all future instances. If you suspect your pre-gen CPU gains are not as good as they could be, this is the place to check you're not running in real time after all.

If you rely on these, you'll want to keep your eye on www. The workaround, in the meantime, is to disable the MAS versions in the plug-in manager and use the Audio Units versions instead. DP6 changes or relocates a fair number of user interface features, as the first part of my 'upgrade guide' revealed in these pages a couple of months back.

Then I dealt with the really big changes, so this month it's time for some of the less obvious ones. Opening Editing windows: It seems that some people really relied on the Control Panel's 'window button' drawer, which gave single—click access to a whole range of editors and configuration panels. With so many editors now easily opened in the central and side-bar cells of the Consolidated Window, you can understand why MOTU felt they could drop this, but if it was an essential part of your workflow, these mostly easily-remembered keyboard shortcuts are the next best thing:.