For many people, the amount that Macs and software cost is a lot of dough. Among those individuals are musicians who have to jerk a couple thousand frappuccinos to come up with the money for a decent Mac and an audio sequencer like Cubase. By the time the foam settles, who has the cash to invest in after-market audio plug-ins — the likes of which cost around $300 a pop? Feeling the struggling artist's pain, Cycling'74 has kicked down Pluggo 3, a collection of over 100 plug-ins for Pro Tools LE, Digital Performer, and any audio package that adheres to the Mac VST standard; at $200, it's a steal.
Talk about a Swiss Army knife of plugins; Pluggo's got your back with just about every type of effect you can think of— delays, filters, pitch effects, distortion, granulation, spectral effects, modulators, multichannel effects, audio routing, reverb and dynamics, and visual display. Their usefulness ranges from use-them-in-every-session stalwarts such as delay and compression, to some real audio mutators like Spectral Filter, Feedback Network, Granular-to-Go, and Noyzckippr. Pluggo has a plug-in for every mood from peaceful to psychotic.
What really puts the love (and value) in the Pluggo package is the inclusion of 19 Essential Instruments— virtual synth and sampler instrument plug-ins created by eowave, the far-out French developer of the iSynth. Like the effects plug-ins, these suckers include all the modern conveniences—additive synths, analog-modeling drum and percussion synths, theremins, sampling, granular synthesis, FM synthesis, and wave-table synthesis. You can easily combine the software instruments with effects and modulator plug-ins to create enough sonic mayhem to keep you buzzing well into the 23rd century.
Pluggo can send and receive MIDI information when used with VST, MAS, and RTAS host applications, and it supports host synchronization for VST and MAS users. Pluggo also supports beat-synchronized parameter changes, sample-accurate tempo sync for a plug-in's modulating LFOs (low-frequency oscillators), and other tempo-related settings such as delay time. Also included is M2M, a plug-in that converts MIDI information into modulation data to change the parameters of other plug-ins for all sorts of electronic music jams.
It can be a nightmare to keep track of over 100 new plug-ins via a drop-down menu, but the designers at Cycling '74 are way ahead of the curve on this one in creating the Plug-in Manager. This feature offers an interface not unlike OS 9's Extensions Manager, keeping your hand-wringing and vile Navy curses to a minimum when you try to find your favorite plug-ins.
Is there a catch? Well, some of the plugins are the sonic equivalent of leaving a Fillet o’ Fish in the glove box for a week or two — they can really stink up your track and render it virtually unusable. Also, the interface quality of the different plug-ins varies from ghetto to professional (spun positively, that means some should be just right for you). Pluggo does have a sweet tooth when it comes to processor cycles, and tends to take a good bite of the CPU's available horsepower.
All that aside, Pluggo is a unique package that will give the beginner and seasoned pro alike plenty of mileage. You'll find everything you need, from basic studio processors to truly inspiring weirdness, so get busy with it.
Carmical, Kent. (November 2002). Pluggo 3. MacAddict. (pg. 49).
Pluggo provides a framework to interface a single, "native Pluggo" plug-in to VST and RTAS standards. In this way, Pluggo is similar to Waves' Waveshell framework. Unlike some other "wrapper" approaches, Pluggo does not add latency to the audio stream.
This is the last version of Pluggo compatible with the Classic versions of Mac OS.
Cycling '74
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pluggo3s.bin
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
QEMU
