Mellowmuse
CP3V Compressor &
CS1V Channel Saturator by Rishabh Rajan
Vintage analog emulation plugins are highly sought after in the primarily digital world of music production. Mellomuse has added a few more options in this market of hardware emulation plugins, and more importantly, made them affordable. Graphical User Interface The visual design of these plugins makes you feel like you are actually using a real hardware unit. The shading on the knobs while rotating them gives it a very realistic and inspiring feel. I particularly like the large knobs and simple layout. The VU meters show compression amount and have a glassy shine, not unlike many hardware units. The only problem I had was with the RTAS version of 80
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CS1V, which does not fill the entire plugin view, so there is a gray background which doesn't complement the visual design of the plugin. Understandably, a lot of developers have the same problem with RTAS plugins that have a portrait layout. I'm guessing this is more of a Pro Tools issue rather than the plugin itself, because this problem is not present in Logic Pro. CPU usage The CP3V & CS1V have 64 bit internal processing, unlike many of Mellowmuse's competitors. I tested a few instances of both the CP3V & CS1V in Logic Pro 9 running in 64 bit mode. The plugin seems to run very smooth, even with multiple instances July 2011
running at the same time. The CPU hit was quite minimal, though this can be quite subjective depending on the specification of the computer being used. In Pro Tools 9, the plugins are running with a delay of 3 samples for the CP3V, and 4 samples for the CS1V, which can be considered negligible. With Automatic Delay Compensation now available in Pro Tools 9, this delay should be considered inconsequential. The CPU hit was slightly more on Pro Tools as compared to Logic Pro. I am not going to comment further, as this area of comparison can be quite debatable and subsequently inconsequential. The Pro Tools vs. Logic Pro war is never-ending.