Audio Units Plug-in Support

Digital Performer serves as the consummate host for all 3rd-party Audio Units (AU) plug-in products. Apply a world of effects processing and virtual instrument sounds from hundreds of available plug-in products from our development partners.

Partners in developing the AU plug-in standard

The Digital Performer engineering team collaborates with Apple engineering and 3rd-party developers on a on-going basis to continue developing the Audio Units (AU) plug-in specification with new and improved host/plug-in API's that add exciting new features and better performance, including:

• Bypass automation — Digital Performer supports bypass automation for Audio Units plug-ins.
• Sample accurate timing — Third-party AU virtual instrument plug-ins are 100% sample accurate, providing the tightest possible timing between MIDI tracks in DP and their AU instrument output.

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  Effects side chains — DP supports AU effect plug-in side chain inputs.
• Instrument side chains — DP supports AU instrument plug-in side chain inputs.
• Cocoa support — DP supports all Cocoa-based graphics in third-party AU plug-ins.
• Ramp automation — DP supports ramp-based automation for all automatable AU plug-ins that also support it.
• Control surface support — All AU plug-in parameters can be controlled with external control surfaces such as the new Euphonix MC Control™ and MC Mix™ Artist Series controllers, the Mackie Control Universal Pro™ and other supported worksurface devices.
• Prioritized MIDI — There is an emerging class of AU instrument plug-in products such as the Access Virus TI™ and Synful Orchestra™ that take advantage of the AU spec's new prioritized MIDI specification, which allows Digital Performer to take full advantage of the features in these products.

Multiple outputs for Audio Units plug-ins and ReWire

Digital Performer supports multiple audio outputs for Audio Units plug-ins and instruments that have them.

Multiple outputs for AUs and ReWire applications are handled by the Instruments tab in the Audio Bundles window. Use it to manage the many instrument plug-in and ReWire outputs you may have in your Digital Performer virtual studio.

Support for AU presets

Some Audio Units plug-ins have the ability to save presets as a standard AU preset file on disk. Digital Performer supports these AU preset files. You can save them and load them, including the ability to drag and drop them to inserts in the Mixing Board.

Plug-in Manager

Digital Performer's plug-in management features help you manage large numbers of audio plug-ins — from the dozens of plug-ins included with DP to hundreds of third-party plug-ins (sold separately). You can enable or disable individual plug-ins, create plug-in sets, make plug-ins load even if they don't pass AU validation, re-examine updated plug-ins for validation and more.

Dedicated plug-in Preset menu

A dedicated Preset menu in the Effects window gives you quick access to both factory and user presets. When the menu is closed, the currently loaded preset is displayed; if it's been edited, it becomes italicized to show you at a glance. Next and previous preset buttons have also been added, and can be controlled with standard Mac keyboard shortcuts or from your MIDI controller.

Hardware-accelerated plug-ins

Hardware-accelerated AU plug-ins load only for the currently play-enabled sequence. This is especially important for TC PowerCore and Universal Audio UAD-1/2 users. In Digital Performer, these plug-ins would take up precious DSP resources, even when they were instantiated in sequences not currently enabled for playback. With Digital Performer, only the plug-ins in the currently play-enabled sequence will load.