At their exhibitor floor booth and their on-site press event, Waves made quite a stir at this most recent AES show in New York. With a trio of smartly designed plugins -- Vocal Rider, WNS, and LoAir -- Waves demonstrated how well they knew the AES audience.

Vocal Rider (left) might have been their coolest offering at the conference, eliciting an audible approval from its press event audience, once said gathering of engineers and producers realized how much time this clever plug would save them. Vocal Rider ostensibly does what usually takes trained ears hours of work, that is, it rider the fader of a vocal track to create completely transparent volume compensation. Vocal Rider is capable of differentiating between singing and breathing on a track, and can even listen to the rest of the mix when making fader movements. You know, like a human would.

LoAir (right) is a subharmonic generator targeted at post-production engineers. In a nutshell, LoAir adds rumble to extant audio, perfect for accentuating ominous soundtracks or earth-quaking sound effects. Waves touts LoAir as the first subharmonic generator for Pro Tools that can process polyphonic or 5.1 surround material.

WNS, or Waves Noise Suppressor (left) is a real-time, multiband noise reduction utility specifically tailored for dialog tracks. Waves promises that WNS will offer "superior sound quality with minimal artifacts" and an interface that "will be immediately familiar to Post engineers."

Pricing and availability for these three plugins are TBA