Music Radar Team

Master full mix material with this single-band limiter.

A heavyweight contender for anyone looking to take control of a powerful, fully fledged Pro Tools LE system.

The most authentic Brian May tone yet, but be warned, it's very loud indeed

One of the best overdrive pedals around with an authentic valve-like tone.

For home practice, project-studio songwriting and an amount of live performance, the MM6 delivers well and for not a lot of dosh.

If you're looking for a device to make your live setups more creative, or a studio tool to remove the mouse-driven ethos from music making, get to your local retailer to try the Zero8.

The FS performs a valuable function at a reasonable cost and makes notions of full band recording or project studio expansion all the more realistic and affordable.

This synth sounds unique and will certainly give your production work an edge and depth you'll struggle to achieve with an allsoft suite of synths.

The new and improved features of Sibelius 5 bolster what is already a very powerful and popular notation application.

It may cost less than £30, but Replicant is definitely the most creative plug-in on the market in any price band for a long time.

This highly flexible reverb plug-in offers clear, expressive and natural sound.

Tascam turn their premium software sampler into a plug-in.

Ohm Force have done it again with an excellent four-band distortion plug-in.

Beautifully elegant, hugely intuitive and its new features make it even more powerful.

Overall, the Neve 88RS is another top plug-in for the UAD platform.

We had a great time playing with the AX 50 USB. The tracking is superb, and the huge array of options make for some mind-boggling possibilities.

Simple to get to grips with and does enough for most users. At this price, the iO|26 is a great deal.

On the whole, this bundle is fantastic; we'd love to see the other SoundToys TDM plug-ins in native form, but this will certainly do for now.

Sounds superb and comes at a bargain price: Acustica Audio should be commended for their forward-thinking approach.

This stripped-back edition of WaveLab is certainly much more affordable than the full version, but it's still not exactly cheap.

SampleLord is decidedly limited as it stands, and doesn't yet offer enough flexibility to be a truly useful tool.

VE|Suite is another decent set of plug-ins from Magix, though you could hardly consider it a must-have.

Flexible, high quality plug-ins: they cost a little more, but they're worth it

Tasty tones, an audio interface, controllers and keys

How do you improve a near-perfect plug-in? You make it more sensitive, implement the latest coding techniques, add a couple of new features and ensure that it still sounds rocking.