Sample Magic intros Magic AB 2, the second version of their plugin utility that can be used to switch between the audio you are working on in your music software, and up to nine reference tracks. Magic AB v2 is an entirely new plugin, rebuilt from the ground up into a new framework.
Get an in-depth look at Magic AB v2 by Sample Magic, a simple yet powerful reference track tool for production, mixing, and mastering.
Magic AB Overview
Sample Magic has earned a strong reputation as being one of the world’s leading provider of professional sound samples, instrument presets, musical components, music production resources, and software to producers across a wide range of genres. Fueling their line of innovative products is the all-new version of Magic AB, an award-winning referencing plugin.
Simplicity is the core concept behind Magic AB. This extremely proficient and powerful plugin allows you to compare the track you are working on with up to nine pre-loaded reference tracks flawlessly. Magic AB is both an indispensable mixing tool and a serious workflow enhancer that excels at regularly checking how your mixes or masters stack up against other commercially produced tracks or tracks that clients have provided as benchmarks.
What makes this tool so amazing is its ability to reference tracks effortlessly without having to setup complex bus routings, inconveniently mute channels, or toggle between outputs. Even more, everything you need is available in one stripped-back interface that does one thing in as an efficient way as possible without draining your CPU resources. It can even be switched to a compact version that uses a minimum amount of screen space, perfect for when you need space for other plugins.
ABing full mixes is just one of the great feature sets of Magic AB. It can also be used on individual channels when working on a new track to help you emulate any sound you admire. For example, you can AB between the source material and the part you’re working on, and then regularly switch between the two as you hone in on the tone you desire.
Magic AB is also a go-to tool for mastering engineers as well, allowing them to compare in an instant the track they are working on not just to other commercial masters, but also to the other tracks on the album.
Magic AB Workflow
Magic AB is arguably the fastest and easiest way to perform instant AB references to compare the track you are working on in your DAW with any commercially produced reference track. It is designed to work best when placed at the end of the processing chain so you can mix a track using your favorite plugins and compare them against reference tracks without affecting the sound of the reference tracks with your processing chain.
Loading reference tracks can’t be any more simplistic. Quickly load a track by simply dragging and dropping an audio file onto a track slot or alternatively, clicking on the text box alongside one of the nine players to open a window that shows two options for loading and unloading audio. Once audio is loaded, you can effortlessly toggle between tracks by clicking the ‘Play’ button next to each of the nine players. Each player also features a ‘Focus’ button that enables you to select a track to view in the display without starting its playback as well as a ‘Gain’ slider to dial in the tracks volume and a ‘RAM’ button for deactivating tracks to ease your CPU load.
Magic AB goes beyond simple playback of reference tracks. This full featured plugin also sports three different playback modes and a host of options that let you hone in on the details such as zoom, play/cue, loop controls, and more. You can now define up to four cue points for each reference track with version 2, and then easily drag the Cue markers to a desired playback location. In addition, you can name Cue points from a list of structural titles such as Intro, Chorus, Drop, etc. for better navigation between Cue points.
No mixing tool is complete without output meters. Balance the relative volume of mixes with the high-res Peak and RMS displays that sports improved Mono/Stereo monitoring, volume faders, and large AB buttons for toggling between your DAW’s output and Magic AB’s reference stream.
Magic AB has workflow in mind at every move. Quickly compare multiple mixes by simply creating and saving your own ‘go-to’ playlists to radically speed up loading tracks or save presets that can be loaded anytime during a session. Magic AB also has the user’s needs in mind as well and features a ‘Bypass’ button to disable the plugin, and preference options that give you the ability to manually adjust crossfade times to give your ears a chance to recalibrate. Allowing your ears to recalibrate is especially useful when your monitoring environment or speakers are less than perfect.
Final Thoughts
Magic AB isn’t designed to enhance your sounds or directly alter your tracks. It is designed as a reference tool used to make the moves necessary to improve your mixes and streamline your workflow. After using Magic AB, I can’t imagine working without it to help me push my sounds into commercial quality territory. In addition, the Dubspot team loves this plugin so much that we use it in our Mixing and Mastering Program.
Key Features
Magic AB is both an powerful mixing tool and a workflow improver that allows the producer to:
- Perform instant AB references: compare the track you are working on in your DAW with any commercially produced reference track in a variety of audio formats (mp3, Aiff, Wav, m4a, AAC).
- Like the sound of a reference? No problems – drag/drop your chosen reference track/s into Magic AB then flick between them and your mix with a single mouse click.
- New in Version 2: three unique referencing modes: Sync to compare your current mix with older versions – a mastering must; Latch to follow the DAW timeline; and Manual for freeform referencing.
- Hone in on the details: cue the reference track from the precise point you want to hear and loop the section you want to focus on. New with V2: save up to four cue/loop points per track and work in detail with the all-new zoom.
- Compare multiple mixes quickly and simply: create and save ‘go-to’ playlists to radically speed up mixing and mastering.
- Balance the relative volume of mixes with extensive, accurate, easy-to-read metering (peak, RMS and crest values with adjustable peak fall time). The clear, ergonomically designed GUI with bold waveform display means you’re always comparing like with like.
- Compare stereo mixes or flip to mono to check mono compatibility.
- Give your ears a chance to recalibrate with manually changeable crossfade times. Flip in an instant, or allow transitions of up to 2000ms.
- Do it all ‘in mini’ with Mini AB – the same powerful feature set at a tenth of the size: ideal for those using smaller screens.
Availability
Magic AB available to download at Authorized Dealers and Sample Magic.
Compatibility: PC and Mac in VST/AU/AAX formats compatible with 32/64bit DAWs.
Mixing and Mastering Program
Transform rough ideas and basic compositions into dance floor bangers and sonically pleasing commercial quality masters. Learn the well-kept industry secrets of EQ, compression, panning, level balancing, reverb and special effects.
About This Program
This program gives you everything you need to refine tracks into a clear commercial quality release, including special mixing and mastering techniques for dubstep, techno, house, trance, downtempo, hip-hop, and the gamut of electronically-produced music. You will learn to mix and master your tracks using the same plugins that top industry engineers use every day, including plugins by Izotope, Soundtoys, Sonnox, Altiverb, and more.
What’s Included
- Mixing & Mastering Level 1: Mix
- Mixing & Mastering Level 2: Modify
- Mixing & Mastering Level 3: Master
Additional Information
Visit the Mixing and Mastering course page for detailed information on this programhere.If you have questions, please call 877.DUBSPOT or send us a message.
Sample Magic's ingenious plug-in makes A/Bing fast, fair and simple.
We've often extolled the virtues of referencing your mixes against commercial tracks in the pages of SOS. The act of referencing, commonly known as A/Bing, refreshes your ears and, if done quickly, can help reveal flaws in your own mix. For the full low-down, check out Mike Senior's September 2008 article on creating a reference CD (http://sosm.ag/sep08-reference-cd).
Magic Ab Vst
A/Bing is easier if you're working in a hardware studio, where you can connect a media player to your mixer or monitor controller and switch back and forth between your working mix and the reference audio. Setting up comparable arrangements within a DAW, by contrast, requires forward planning in terms of routing, level matching and muting channels that contain reference material. That's where Magic AB comes in. Conceived by Marc Adamo, it's the first plug-in from sample library specialists Sample Magic, and is available in 32- and 64-bit VST, Audio Unit, AAX and RTAS formats. Magic AB is a specialised media player plug-in that allows you to quickly switch between your own mix and up to nine different reference tracks, each with independent level controls and looping options. It's designed to occupy the final audio effect insert slot on your mix bus, so that your reference material does not get fed through any mix bus processing, such as compression or EQ, that is being applied to your mix-in-progress.
As Easy As AB
Conceptually, Magic AB is much like having a media player connected to a monitor controller, but with some really useful added features. Fast switching is key to the efficacy of any A/Bing method. As Mike Senior puts it, 'The ear is very quick to acclimatise to changes in tone between mixes, so the quicker you can switch between your reference tracks and your mix, the more revealing the process is likely to be.” Magic AB converts the sample rate of your reference tracks to that of your project and then loads the audio into the system RAM so that playback and switching are instantaneous. The down side is that this can quite quickly use a significant amount of RAM, especially if you record at higher sample rates. However, as most DAWs have already moved to 64-bit architecture, and can therefore address an unlimited amount of RAM, this should become less of a problem over time, especially given that RAM upgrades are so affordable these days.
Uncompressed WAV and AIFF files at up to 24-bit/96kHz quality can be converted within the plug-in on Windows systems, as can MP3 files, with additional support for the AAC format on Macs. FLAC is the most common lossless audio file format, so I was surprised to find that it's not natively supported on Mac. This isn't a big issue, as there are freeware tools for converting FLAC files to WAV, but it's worth noting. With the correct codecs installed on a PC, there are no such issues.
Thanks to a big A/B toggle switch on the plug-in, flipping back and forth between the two audio streams is intuitive, and by mapping MIDI CC messages to a controller, switching can be achieved without opening the plug-in window. If fast switching isn't for you, though, it is possible to set a crossfade time between 0 and 2000 ms.
Level Playing Fields
If you're mixing any modern genre of music, chances are that your reference material will be much louder than your mix, because it's been maximised and limited during mastering. Our ears often tell us that louder is better, so to make a fair comparison, you should match the level of the reference tracks to your mix. Magic AB's level-matching functionality is thus one of its main selling points.
Magic AB has two ±12dB faders, one for your material on the 'A' channel, and one for your references on the 'B' channel. There are also likely to be level differences between each of the commercial tracks loaded into the plug-in, so each track also has its own ±12dB level control. If any of your references are unmastered audio files, the extra 12dB boost will be particularly handy. The implementation has been well thought out, making the potentially laborious task of level-matching several audio files very quick.
Magic AB's timeline is independent from that of the host DAW, and instead of just running each reference track from start to finish, it lets you loop a user-defined section of each, with the help of a zoomable waveform display. Although muscle memory from my DAW zoom key-commands tripped me up a few times, dragging loop points within the plug-in interface soon became familiar. Once a loop is set, DJ software-style quarter, half, 2x and 4x buttons help to make changing the loop length painless. Magic AB always loads the entire file, even if you're only referencing a small loop, so in theory its RAM footprint can be dramatically reduced by pre-editing loops before loading them. However, this obviously is more work and prevents you from making any changes to the loop within the plug-in.
One of the few limitations in the current version is that if you want to loop, say, a chorus and a verse from the same track, you would need to open two instances of the same audio file with different loop points. Being able to define more than one looped section per track would be a welcome feature, freeing up track slots and potentially RAM as well, and this is promised for a future update.
Presets
The nine slots available for reference tracks proved quite enough for my needs, although an unlimited number of presets can be saved. Loop points and levels are all saved within presets, so saving and recalling playlists for specific tasks is very straightforward. These tasks might include generally acclimatising yourself to a new room or testing your mix against extremes, such as when sibilance is piercing or the bass is too loud. They're also really good if you want to put together genre playlists or, as part of the mastering process, adjust relative track levels so they sit together on an album.
The plug-in has built-in Peak and RMS meters as well as a crest factor meter that measures the difference between the other two values. Helpfully, both working mix and reference audio streams are metered simultaneously, so it's possible to make some judgements about dynamic processing without having to switch back and forth endlessly. For more detailed analysis, I found using Magic AB with a spectrum analyser and various other meters offered an extra layer of insight.
Although Magic AB doesn't change the sound of your mix directly, using it as a reference tool will help to improve your mixes. It's often said that there's no magic bullet for creating a great mix, but Magic AB helps to reveal any weaknesses, and that's invaluable. Considering how much easier this plug-in makes referencing, and how inexpensive it is, for me it's a no-brainer. Magic AB will be a fixture at the end of my mix bus for the foreseeable future.
Pros
- Massively streamlines mix referencing.
- Very inexpensive.
- Looping features are simple but effective.
- Level-matching is quick and intuitive.
Cons
Magic Ab Vst Free Download Free
- RAM footprint can be quite big.
- No native support for FLAC on Mac.
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Summary
Magic Ab Vst Free Download Fl Studio 12
Magic AB is a serious tool for checking your mixes against the competition. Although similar functionality can be achieved with workarounds, this puts all the main tools for referencing in one place, and for a surprisingly small outlay. Once you've seen how easy referencing can be, you'll be reluctant to go back.