New Music Gear Monday: Acustica Audio Magic Flow Multi-Processor Plugin

If you typically use a lot of plugins, you know that it becomes pretty time consuming adding and tweaking them all, even if you use a template. Channel strips help but they usually don’t have all the features that modern mixers need. Award-winning mixer Josh Gudwin (check out Inner Circle Podcast #138) wanted an all-in-one plugin to help him mix faster, so he teamed up with Acustica Audio for the new Magic Flow multi-processor plugin.

Not A Channel Strip

Magic Flow is not your typical channel strip, or even a channel strip at all. It has a number of built-in processors configured in a logical chain, but that’s where the similarities end. It starts with a Low Cut and High Cut filter and then gets pretty unique.

An Input Preamp is placed in the chain after the filter stage and before peak leveling, and it’s a combination of compression, saturation and EQ curve from Josh’s analog style console used during his sessions. Then comes a Peak Leveling Compressor that has 2 fixed EQ curves, pre and post compression and a maximum gain reduction of 7dB.

On the upper right hand side comes a Dynamic EQ that acts on six bands with very specific settings from Josh’s workflow. Then comes a Dynamic Resonance Controller that’s divided into 4 segments with A, B, C for general control affecting the specified range of frequencies, while D will listen to the specified range and compress the whole signal when ‘harshness’ is detected.

And There’s More

The Dynamic Balance is a digital compressor for rebalancing the content after the resonance controlling operation and before going into the EQ. After that there’s a Mid Bump switch that’s placed at the end of the chain between the EQ and the output gain to add a saturation stage with a specific kind of mid-range saturation.

There’s also an Output Preamp, global Dry/Wet control, and a final limiter that never exceeds 0dBFS.

A center display sits in the middle of the plugin and is unique in that it that follows the mouse. When the mouse moves across different sections of the plugin, the display will show the information for that section. Another display at the bottom center of the plugin allows you to change the oversampling rate to improve the audio quality increasing the sampling frequency of the plugin.

The best part is that Magic Flow has an introductory price of just $90USD (normally $175) until March 15th. Go here for more information, or watch the video below for an overview.

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