It's small annoyance but if you care about workflow it begins to build. What is in each instance of VMR? You don't know till you click on it. I found myself growing less and less happy with it in use, because i have a number of carefully chosen non-slate plugins i like to use, and my tracks started to look something like this : In your DAW's plugin list, VMR shows up as 'VMR,' not as the modules you have chosen. The rack takes up a good deal of screen real estate, but it's low on CPU use and if you only ever want to use slate plugins, ever, it's not bad, although the idea of a rack inside the rack in your DAW is odd. The red comps worked better for me for lighter, more transparent compression. I had a hard time with the black comp, based on an 1176, but once I figured it out I found it to be an excellent software comp for smacky stuff. It seemed t add a degree of 'dimension,' Although when i A/B/x'ed it with different Neve emulation I had a hard time picking it out. Small changes had significant impact on a mix. The Neve Eq especially grabbed me: it was very 'musical' and it seemed to be highly effective. I liked the modules very much for the most part. There was also a free module called 'revival' which was something like an exciter/saturator for highs and lows. As initially released, VMR included five modules: Two compressors, one modeled on an 1176 and one modeled on several different un-named comps, and two eqs, one based on Neve and one based on SSL. You choose one of those modules, drag it into the box, and you are off to work. VMR is a departure from Slate's other plugins in that as the name says it's a virtual 'rack.' You choose it in your DAW, click on it, and it opens as a rectangular box with a scrolling list of plugin modules in it. They are now pioneers in new forms of marketing-VMR is the centerpiece of a new subscription model. They seem to get very close if not actually all the way there, depending on who you ask. They promise-with no shortage of hyperbole-to deliver plugins that are virtually indistinguishable from the hardware they emulate. Slate Digital specializes in analog modeled plugins. The individual plugins are very good, the rest is a big pill to swallow. Synopsis: You can't consider this separately from the delivery system it comes with.

What happened to slate virtual mix rack