What to reach for

Governed by: docs/design/specs/2026-07-15-plugin-catalog-tiered-packaging.md

The catalog is an inventory. This page is the short list: what to put on a channel when you have no time to read a table. Two jobs, because they want different things — a show cares about latency above almost everything, and a mix does not.

The house processors

Two of the desk's most useful processors are not LV2 plugins at all, and so appear in no table here: they are built into the console and carry no hosting verdict to earn.

• FBS, the feedback suppressor — listens to a channel, recognises a ring and plants a narrow cut at its frequency, per channel and off until you arm it. See feedback suppression.
• HRP, the harmonic resonance processor — finds unusually strong harmonic components of one instrument's material and applies sparse, conservative cuts. Rack it on a channel, never on a bus or a sum, where the harmonic model describes nothing. It racks bypassed.

Both are live tools first. In the studio the harmonic stage earns its place for the opposite reason: run the other way it adds harmonics rather than removing them — a colour, not a cure.

For a live show

100 plugins. Chosen for the live job: measured inside the live latency allowance at every rate, from a family with a track record, and with no control that can quietly overrun the budget mid-show. Sorted by latency at 96 kHz.

For studio mixing

The desk is equally a studio mixer, and the studio job lifts the one constraint the live list is built around: latency stops disqualifying, and the stakes of an overrun fall. So the studio list is the live list plus the 6 recommended plugins the live allowance excludes — look-ahead limiters, multiband dynamics, linear-phase and convolution work.

It is not simply the live list with the limits removed: some entries are the same plugin used for a different job, the harmonic processor above being the clearest case.

What the console offers

The picker serves 70 plugins — the curated palette, not everything installed on the machine. A plugin you installed by hand will not appear even though the host can load it; the palette is a short list you can trust under pressure, and the full matrix is one click away.

Each role below is one of the picker's groups, ranked the way the picker ranks it: the lowest latency class first, the better-known house first within a class, heavy variants last. An entry whose plugin is not installed on the machine is left out of the picker rather than shown greyed. Width is the build: a mono one fits a one-channel destination such as a wedge or a mono input, a stereo one a stereo strip. Latency is the curator's class, the same zero / low / high the catalog uses.

EQ

Compressor

Glue Bus Comp

Gate / Expander

De-esser

Limiter

Reverb

Delay

Saturation

Modulation

Filter / HPF

What suitable means

A plugin marked suitable has earned a place on the console's own audio thread, where there is no separate host process between it and the mix. That is worth a buffer in and a buffer out per insert, and at 96 kHz an engineer can hear the difference. It is also the most dangerous place in the system: one memory allocation inside the audio callback is the whole desk's dropout, and one crash is the whole desk's silence. So it is earned, never granted:

• Nothing that can block. No memory allocation, no lock and no system call anywhere in the audio callback, measured under a sweep of every parameter — not read from a promise in the plugin's documentation.
• A clean soak at all four rates. 44.1, 48, 96 and 192 kHz, each run long enough to catch the plugins that look perfect for a second.
• A thousand rack and unrack cycles without a leak, a stray thread or a fault.
• Affordable, knowable and the right shape — its cost at 96 kHz under the ceiling, its latency resolved, and one-in-one-out or stereo so it fits a strip.

The verdict is the worst of those, and an absent measurement counts against rather than for: unknown keeps a plugin in its own process exactly as unsuitable does. conditional means it measured well but one dimension carries a caution worth reading before you lean on it.

Of the plugins measured, 367 are suitable today. The rest run in a host process of their own, which costs a buffer each way and is where the large majority of any LV2 collection will always live. Nothing about that makes them worse plugins.

See the catalog for the full matrix.