GEAR OF THE YEAR

2019 was an incredible year in music gear and software. To celebrate, we’ve rounded up the best for our annual awards. “Ladies and gentlemen…”

It’s awards season as we reveal the best hardware and software of 2019 in our look back at the year

2019 was certainly what you can call a vintage year for music production, with groundbreaking new software releases, plugins-aplenty and major DAW updates. In short, there has never been a more exciting time to make incredible music with a PC or Mac (or with a multitude of mobile devices, while you are at it). So, in what we can now call our traditional, endof-year roundup, we are celebrating the best software releases and the most fulsome updates of the last year in our annual Computer Music awards. (Think of it as our equivalent of the Oscars, only ours are more important, albeit a little less lavish…) )

As last year, we have nine (slightly tweaked) award categories covering everything from mixing and mastering plugins right up to complete DAWs to run them; from innovations and bargains to essential studio hardware, we are covering everything your computer music studio requires.

Judging has been straightforward: basically a product needs to have been tested by over the last 12 issues – so there are a few DAWs missing as many only mustered the odd point update – and all nominations had to score at least 8/10 to be considered. Then it was a simply case of all the experts fighting it out to decide on a winner for each category, along with taking on board your feedback on what has and has not worked for you in your own recording setups.

So without further ado, raise your glasses for the winners of the best software and hardware of 2019!