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Samplitude's interface remains busy and fiddly.

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• Review

Virtual guitar amp

As for genuinely new plug-ins, the big one has to be the Vandal amp sim. It's de rigueur for today's DAWs to offer guitar and bass amp simulation, and this sees Magix following suit.

Operation is simple, with the main amp section offering gain and EQ knobs as well as a Voicing section that's like a parametric cut or boost. There's a choice of Classic, British and Modern amp styles (each with Clean, Crunch and Lead channels and Class A or Class AB power amp), as well as a bass amp.

The mic section enables you to select a speaker and enclosure, and position and mix two mics (there's a condenser and two dynamics). Stomp FX include four overdrives, chorus, phaser and wah wah. There's no compressor pedal, sadly, but there are two 'rack' effects on the output, with compression, delay, modulation and reverb, the latter being very sweet.

Sonically, Vandal really delivers, with everything from modern rectified growling distortions to glistening clean tones being adeptly handled. While you don't get zillions of models to toy with, there's definitely no lack of variety, and the slick, guitarist-friendly interface makes it easy to steer the tone as you wish.

Vandal will also be made available as a VST plug-in at the end of March, priced £150, and we'll be covering it in a dedicated review as soon as it's ready to rock.

Elsewhere, there's the sMax11 brickwall limiter, which has four modes, a release control and simple gain/ceiling sliders. It does a great job, although it's not on a par with the best third-party efforts.

There's a new EQ, too, called EQ116. It offers six bands, with high-/low-pass, peak and shelf for each; normal, oversampling and linear phase modes; an analyser; and a phase plot.

It's not all new plug-ins, of course. A key new feature is Revolver Tracks, enabling you to make alternate versions of any track's contents and flip between them at will. It's akin to A/B'ing presets on a plug-in, except you're switching between track contents instead, making it ideal for trying out arrangements, alternate edits, etc.

Also new are a velocity-manipulating MIDI tool/plug-in and a groove system. Grooves can be grabbed from MIDI, or from audio using the Audio Quantization Wizard which, as with v10, can be quite hit and miss (mainly the latter). While we're on the topic of quantisation, Samplitude finally has a button on the toolbar for changing the snap grid.

Further interface tweaks are a dockable interface system, a nicer skin and easy object/track colouring. You can browse for loops in the Manager and preview them in sync, too (but with certain audio modes, it was consistently off the beat – ouch).

A few instabilities reared their heads during our test sessions. The system would often freeze when saving projects using Vita with certain audio modes engaged, and also when enabling a laptop's onboard audio. Magix is aware of the issues, though, and are working to solve them.