Juice Your Sound
Pick from a world of free and commercial audio plug-ins to get the right sound for your show.
Plug-ins are self-contained digital filters that can snap into any application that supports their particular plug-in standard. Several plug-in standards are available, but the most popular is the cross-platform Virtual Studio Technology (VST) standard, and the Macintosh-specific Audio Unit (AU) plug-ins.
Plug-ins usually install themselves or have a README file attached, which will walk you through the installation. Once you’ve installed them, you can use them in several ways. In Audacity, they are run against the current selection of audio, and the result is placed back into the file, replacing the selection. In mixer and recording programs, the plug-ins snap into the signal path so that you can hear their effect immediately as you record, though some will cause a delay in the signal.
Programs such as Peak allow you to set up a series of plug-ins and then run the signal through it while tweaking the parameters until you get the sound you want. The input and output of each plug-in is shown with a graphical meter.
In Figure 8-13, you can see the original input of the lefthand side going through a set of three VST filters and popping out on the righthand side. With the e button on each effect, you can edit the effect’s parameters to tweak the sound.
Vboxing with Audio Hijack Pro
If you want the dynamic effect processing ability of the Vbox, where you can tweak the settings and ...
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