Plug-ins

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 5/5 Stars. Quiet Music may not be the biggest name in software instruments, but for those producing ambient, chillout or lo‑fi music, the company’s products are a real find.

Toontrack and Frank Filipetti span a vast array of musical genres with the latest Superior Drummer expansion.

Rating: **** 4/5 Stars. The Lost Reveries library offers ambient drone sounds and were created by Hilyard, an artist well known in the genre and with some 25 album releases to his name.

Does the latest iteration of NI’s Komplete music production suite provide all the tools you need?

Rating: 4.5/5 Stars. In addition to reverberant clangs and monumental industrial noises, Mercury also excels at quiet, eerie and mysterious textures.

Rating: 5/5 Stars. This very affordable choral instrument from Spitfire Audio features a 50‑piece mixed vocal ensemble recorded at AIR Studios’ legendary Lyndhurst Hall in London.

Rating: **** 4/5 Stars. Spitfire's inexpensive instrument is described as “Explosive Afro‑percussion meets dub and free jazz”.

Rating: ***** 5/5 Stars. Bold is a sound library with a colourful user interface that features sampled drums, effects/Foley, keys and bass sounds.

Rating: **** 4/5 Stars. Moonglades provides the user with a modest number of distinctive sounds that can be modified to a limited but useful degree via very simple controls.

The Viennese maestros go intergalactic with their full-scale orchestra range.

Falcon features a DAW-style mixer with up to 17 pairs of outputs, and supports UVI sound libraries (of which there are many), so one of its functions is to act as a sample library player.

These files accompany the Sample Shop articles in the April 2016 issue of SOS.

This new software instrument majors on lively and evocative loops and phrases that can be flexibly combined to create convincing world-music atmospheres.

Ever fancied arranging 'Oops, I Did It Again' for a full choir? Well now you can, courtesy of Symphonic Choirs, the latest virtual-instrument sample library from East West and Quantum Leap.

This Adobe Premiere plug-in has now been ported to two different real-time plug-in formats: VST (for Mac OS 9, OS X and Windows) and Apple's new Audio Unit standard (for OS X).