Process.Audio has introduced Protility, a free utility plugin available in VST, AU, and AAX formats for Windows and macOS.
Protility is designed as an all-in-one audio correction tool for mixing and sound design. It offers essential tools that help refine individual tracks before mixing. It’s basically a toolkit for cleaning up your audio before you start working on your mix, and I love that idea.
With a collection of basic but useful audio utilities, it works best as the first insert on a channel. It lets you tackle common audio issues efficiently before you go into EQing, compression, and the rest of your mixing tools.
Protility is mainly focused on improving mix clarity and balance. You can use it to apply phase correction, a high-pass filter, stereo width adjustment, bass mono conversion, panning, gain trim, and metering.
One of my favorite features is the bass mono control, particularly useful in electronic music production. Many bass synth presets tend to have an unnecessarily wide stereo field in the low frequencies, which can introduce phase problems.
With Protility, you can quickly convert bass frequencies to mono, ensuring a solid, focused low end.
The plugin also comes with a preset manager, making it easy to save and recall commonly used correction settings. This is great if you frequently apply the same adjustments across multiple tracks. You can simply load Protility on your channel, apply the preset, and move on to the more important stuff.
For example, create a preset that removes everything below 40 Hz and sets all the bass frequencies below 100 Hz to mono. This would work well as the first insert on most synth bass tracks.
The GUI looks clean and modern, with optional light and dark modes. The controls are well-organized, with clearly labeled knobs and easy-to-read values.
However, I do have a minor issue in the design department but not with the plugin itself.
While the plugin is well-designed and intuitive, the official product page is more flashy than necessary. It’s cool that it shows different animations as you scroll down the page, but it’s also hard to find the most important info this way. A more straightforward layout with a demo video and essential details upfront would be much better, in my opinion.
Protility is available as a free download in VST, AU, and AAX plugin formats, but you must first register and activate an account on the Process.Audio website. The registration process is free and requires a valid email address.
The plugin supports Windows 8.1, Windows 10, and Windows 11 (64-bit versions only), as well as macOS 10.13 (High Sierra) and newer, including Apple Silicon compatibility.
Download: Protility (FREE, requires user account registration, available for Windows and macOS)
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