A world of effects processing at your fingertips

Digital Performer includes dozens of effects plug-ins that you can use during every step of of the recording, mixing and mastering process to perfect your recordings.

Plug-in Manager

Digital Performer's plug-in management features help you manage large numbers of audio plug-ins — from the dozens of included plug-ins 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.

Plug-in preset management

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 button can be controlled with standard Mac keyboard shortcuts or from your MIDI controller.

User plug-in presets are grouped into a User Presets sub-menu. In addition, many factory presets are organized into convenient, categorized sub-folders.

User plug-in presets are saved independently from Digital Performer documents or the Digital Performer application itself. Instead, they are stored as preset files on disk. This makes it easier to access them across projects and share them with colleagues and clients.

Plug-in effects chains (channel strip presets)

Save, recall, and manage plug-in chains as single presets, including guitar effects chains and virtual instrument chains that include effects. Dozens of channel strip presets are provided for drums, guitar, bass, vocals, instruments and more.

If you drag and drop an effects chain preset onto a track in DP's Mixing Board, extra insert slots are added automatically, if necessary, to accommodate all the plug-ins in the chain.

V-Racks

What's a V-Rack? It's a place to load virtual instruments and effects that are available to all sequences in a Digital Performer project.

A V-Rack™ looks and operates just like a sequence, except that it holds aux tracks, virtual instrument tracks and master faders - no disk tracks. Any effects or instruments loaded in it are accessible from all other sequences in your Digital Performer project. It's like having a virtual effects and instrument rack — just like the name V-Rack implies.

Use V-Racks any time you have multiple sequences that share the same effects processing or virtual instruments. For example, you might load one instance of MachFive in a V-Rack and then play it from each of three different sequences, rather than having to load MachFive three times (once in each individual sequence). This saves you tons of CPU power and RAM, not to mention load time.

You can also use V-Racks for building a mastering chain (via a master fader), to which you then feed the master output from multiple sequences to achieve absolute consistency during mastering. You can use the same technique for consistent effects/return loops.

V-Racks are also great for virtual instruments or effects processing during live performance.

Mix V-Rack instruments side by side with sequence tracks

The Mixing Board allows you to view and mix V-Rack channels side by side with all of your sequence tracks, for a seamless integrated mixing experience. Tabs at the top of the Mixing Board channels clearly identify V-Rack and disk track channels. In all other respects, mixing is entirely consistent and intuitive across all channels.

Plug-in latency compensation

Running under MAS and DAE, Digital Performer's plug-in latency compensation is sample-accurate — for any MAS, Audio Units, TDM or RTAS plug-in (including virtual instruments).

And it's fully automatic. You just load your plug-ins and go. Latency compensation is especially useful for users of hardware-accelerated plug-ins such as the TC Electronic PowerCore and the Universal Audio UAD-1 or 2.

Previewing effects plug-in region operations

When you apply a plug-in as a region operation from the Audio menu Plug-ins sub-menu and then click the Preview button, the currently selected region loops continuously until you click the Stop button (or click anywhere outside the effect window). Parameter adjustments can be heard in real time as you change them. A preroll and postroll amount can be added to the beginning and end of the currently selected region for previewing purposes. These previewing enhancements have also been made for Audio Units being applied as region operations.