Most of us now have plug-in folders that are bursting with effects, but in our more honest moments, we might be willing to admit that some of them aren’t quite as important to us as others.

Or to put it another way, we all have our favourite effects: the go-to processors that we turn to again and again.

It’s these must-have tools that we asked you to nominate as we sought to create as definitive a list as possible of the greatest VST and AU effects plug-ins in the world today. Then, true to form, we presented you with said list and asked you to vote for a winner.

The results of this vote are shown in reverse order in the gallery you’re about to enter. We can’t honestly say that we’ve got every great effect here - the market is now so vast that some great plug-ins were bound to miss the cut - but what we do have is a collection of processors that any producer would love to have installed on their PC or Mac.

NEXT: Audio Damage EOS