“It wasn’t an easy task, nor did I do very much… ”

It’s taken a while but we’re finally unveiling v2.0 of the ‘mighty’ Plugin Suite. In reality this is more out of necessity rather than something we’d been looking forward to doing, thanks to many of the older plugins becoming either too clunky or simply not working on the latest operating systems. (aka ‘Macs’ as most of the older ones still work on a PC, which you’ll find in a couple of ‘legacy’ folders.) I won’t pretend it was an easy task, nor that I had much to do with it. Long-time contrib Jon Musgrave had the odious task of testing each and every one of them and this issue celebrates his hard work. So we’ve assembled some of the newer and better plugins for a feature (starting on p16), exploring how these can improve your music making, and on p82 we have a full guide to everything in the Suite. Observant readers might notice that we have sliced out more than we have inserted, but fear not, it was left to me to tell the various plugin developers that they were being excluded (thanks to Apple). And by and large they have said that they will produce replacement or much updated freebies for the Suite – such is its stature I guess – so we’ll be bringing you a surge of new plugins over the next few issues. Yes, I know that goes against my all-new ‘less is more’ philosophy when it comes to plugins and music production tools, but I have magazines to sell and kids to feed. ‘Clever’ philosophies never put food on the table did they, eh?