Simple, yet effective tube-preamp free Plug-In "RubyTube"

[Strangesound]

Hey guys,

just wanted to share this easy to use plug-in which compresses and sweets up your tracks in a very nice way. It's windows only sadly.
Less tweaking, more results

http://www.silverspike.com/?Products:RubyTube

[mojobone]

Ruby Tube has been around a while and at a very agreeable price, but it's a 32-bit plugin; it would require a bridge if you run it on a modern 64-bit operating system. I'm familiar with it, it works, but it doesn't really do subtle power-stage tube distortion. If you want a little bloom and grit, WaveArts' Tube Saturator 2 is a pretty decent deal, usually listed at $199 but you can often find it discounted at half off.

There are other software plugins offering many other kinds of distortion/saturation; iZotope's Trash and I forget who makes Speakerboxx, but this is the most accurate tube sim I've heard and it comes with a crazy useful three bands of Baxandall EQ. That 'pillowy' bass sound? It's in there.

I don't actually use it for distortion, I use it as a sort of quasi-console, cuz it's great for knocking the digital edges off just about any signal; however, I have the old 32-bit version which is pretty CPU-intensive, so on my old machine, I render out the tracks with tube saturation before I start to mix.