As the peaks and troughs build up, you can then simply click one with the mouse to create an EQ band targeting that area.Hover the mouse over the lower right part of the screen, and you’ll see that the output gain control has, er, gained some new features, too. Hover the mouse pointer over the spectrum analyser for a few moments, and a thicker white line appears, displaying the integrated peak level over time. A button at the top right-hand side of the Pro-Q 2 window puts it into full-screen mode, and a button in the opposite corner brings up a musical keyboard along the bottom, so that you can visualise the spectral display in terms of note pitches, and quantise the frequencies of individual bands to them.And that’s not all. You can also display the spectrum of the side-chain input, if you’re using one (of which more in a moment), and in case all this extra information makes things cluttered, you can now resize the entire window to a choice of four dimensions, or zoom in horizontally on a particular area of interest. In Pro-Q 2, it’s enabled by default, with the input and output signals superimposed so that you can see exactly what your EQ settings are doing to the sound. In the original, real-time spectral analysis was available, but you had to enable it manually, and decide whether you wanted the input or the output signal to be displayed.

One of my vanishingly few niggles, though, is that if for instance you change an existing band from a low shelving cut to tilt shelf mode, it ‘tilts’ the other way from what you’d expect, with a low-frequency boost and high-frequency cut.The most telling improvements have been made in the area where Pro-Q already stood out from the crowd: its graphical user interface. By setting a very low Q value, you can indeed ‘tilt’ the frequency response of a source in surprisingly effective fashion. Probably more useful more of the time, though, is the new ‘tilt shelf’, which is like having high and low shelving bands centred on the same point, with one cutting while the other boosts. The range of Q values available in Pro-Q 2 also goes further into the realms of vertiginous steepness than the original.

This enables ‘Gain/Q interaction’, a common property of some analogue EQ designs whereby the bandwidth narrows as more boost or attenuation is applied. If I’m honest, in fact, it hadn’t really occurred to me that there might be ways in which it could be made even better! Fabfilter themselves, though, have not been so complacent, and version 2 of Pro-Q offers a positive avalanche of new features.Some of these are quite subtle, like the small gear wheel that now appears between the Gain and Q dials when you create a parametric EQ band. Simple, informative, flexible and unhampered by trying to look like a piece of hardware from 1968, Pro-Q made it easy to do whatever needed doing, whether that was gentle tonal correction, notching out an annoying resonance, clearing up a muddy low end or any of the other innumerable tasks for which one might reach for an equaliser.It quickly became my first-choice EQ plug-in, and I’ve spent much of the last four years happily popping Pro-Qs into insert slots. By Sam InglisFabfilter’s Pro-Q already did everything an EQ should do - so what can they have added in version 2?When the original version of Fabfilter’s Pro-Q was released in 2011, it had probably the best user interface of any EQ plug-in I’ve seen.

Fabfilter pro crack