Reviewed: Pluggo 1.0.7

Continued...

The standard Pluggo interface won't win any graphic design awards, but they're easy to understand and manipulate and that's important. You can Command-Click many of the sliders to enable shortcuts for changing values and even randomize them for sounds you might not have thought of yourself. The "Evolve" option (not available in Kansas) is neat, it just moves your settings up a little more across the board or individually. The standard sliders are easy to identify and use too. When your pointer touches a slider, a brief explanation of its function usually appears at the bottom of the box, kinda like an automatic help function. Good idea.

The Dr. Dop Plug-In

Several of the plug-ins deviate from the standard look to give you the option of seeing a visual display of the effect to better set it or understand its operation. They really do help too. The Cyclotron filter and the Harmonic Filter are two examples of displays that really help you to understand just what the plug-in is doing to your file. The Dr. Dop (Doppler) filter above shows you just how and where it's attempting to place your sound in a 3-dimensional sound field. Really nice.

The Space Echo Plug-In

There's a fine vocoder (10 or 16-band) and a phone filter for all those spacy dance vocal EFX. The aforementioned Harmonic filter breaks up your signal into many frequency bands and boosts or cuts those bands and then moves those settings around according to your settings. This can be the equivalent of quick video cutting for your ears. Not much use to the folkie (yet?), but the remix or techno man will have a field day with this one.

Also included is the Pluggo Buss plug-in. This allows you to run effects together in series and keep control over their parameters thereby increasing the audio possibilities many times over. Some of the included plug-ins (like audio2control and others) exist only to modify other plug-ins or to analyze waveforms visually. You can control other plug-in parameters in real time using the Mouse Mod plug-in. This enables you to set up to 4 different parameters to control using the x/y axis right on your screen. For example you can have the vertical motion set to chorus depth and the horizontal set to delay feedback and you just mouse around while the file plays back and add that wonderful human touch. Very hip.

You don't have to install all 74 plug-ins at once if you don't want to. Pluggo includes a plug-in manager that works kinda like Apple's Extension Manager so you can load or unload plug-ins as you see fit. As an added bonus, this little application will manage other plug-ins for other programs too like, oh...Adobe PhotoShop for example. Nice bonus.

There are granulators that take small bits of your audio files and massage them into new (and hopefully interesting) sounds. There are distorters that will do all kinds of "lo-fi" and crunchy wackiness to your sounds. There are delays, some with filters, that can add a fascinating spacial dimension to your music. Raindrops is a particular favorite. Breakpoints lets you create your own envelope settings and apply them to any other plug-in so for example, a modulator will only trigger on a sound that falls within the envelope setting at that particular time. The filters like the Cyclotron are a real kick too. Precise graphical settings of filters and resonance applied over time using a step sequencer. Since this can be seen as "evolving" music files, it is also not legal in Kansas.

Is this all starting to sound like it's too good to be true? Well, here's the thing. Some things cut with the precision of a razor, others like a meat cleaver. Most of these plug-ins paint with a pretty broad stroke, if you get my drift. Precision can be found to be sure but this ain't the package for subtle nuances. This is mainly an audio chop-shop for your files and it's full of ideas and capabilities beyond my poor imagination and maybe yours as well. Again it's all about the inspiration factor and Pluggo provides it in spades. And the value simply cannot be beat. The presets for the plug-ins are well thought out and provide excellent springboards for your own brand of musical whoopla and whimsy, should you be so tilted, er...inclined.

If all of this isn't enough to satisfy you, you can also get additional plug-ins for free via Cycling '74's Pluggo-the-Month Club. Soon, only registered users will be able to access these new plug-ins, but anyone can download and install at least the first three VST plug-ins released as part of the club, available on Cycling '74's web site. If you still want more, Pluggo 2.0 is reportedly nearing completion. Version 2.0 will work with Digital Performer and support VST 2.0 enhancements which allow MIDI data to be sent from and received by plug-ins.

Well I'm glad you're still with me. Now point your browser to www.cycling74.com and start downloading your demo. I'm only scratching the surface here, you will discover much more on your own and as the Boss once wrote, "Mama, that's where the fun is." Now go - you know what to do. And don't forget to HAVE FUN! BCNU.

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