Boutique instruments & effects

Award Audio Tools — boutique Mac & Windows VST & AU plugins

Audio Tools

One screen, endless character. Hand-built plugins that keep a whole effect chain in front of you instead of buried in menus — preset-first, signed & notarised, on Mac and Windows.

500+ presets Mac & WindowsSigned & notarised
See one working

Dry, then the preset

Parallax on a guitar take — played clean first, then the preset swept in, so you hear exactly what it does. The real plugin window, not a mock-up.

Every plugin has one — they're on the product pages.

The catalog

One philosophy, no filler

Every one is a finished chain on a single screen — nothing to route, nothing buried. Start from a preset, push it where you want it, done.

Every plugin is a digital download for Mac and Windows, licensed for your own use on the computers you own — and whatever you make with it is entirely yours.
By purchasing you agree to our Terms of Use & Software Licence and Privacy Notice.

Hear it

Dry vs. plugin, one click

The same take, before and after. Hit play, then flip between the raw signal and the plugin doing its thing — no reload, no gap.

0:00 / 0:00
The idea

Character without the chain-building

The sound you'd get from stacking five plugins and balancing them for an hour — except it's one window, and the balance is already done.

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Built to commit

No menu diving, no fifty-page manual. One macro or a full board, it's all on one screen — and it sounds like something the moment you load it.

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Preset-first

Every plugin ships with a deep, sorted bank. Start from a sound that works, then tweak — nothing starts from zero.

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Mac & Windows

Mac: VST3, AU and Standalone, Universal for Apple Silicon and Intel (macOS 10.15+). Windows: VST3, 64-bit (Windows 10+). Works in Logic, Ableton, FL, Bitwig and more.

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Signed & notarised

Drag it in and it runs. No Terminal commands, no Gatekeeper warnings, no quarantine dance.

How it works

From checkout to your DAW in minutes

A digital download — no shipping, no account to create. Here's the whole journey.

Buy securely

Pick a plugin and check out with card or Apple Pay, straight from this site. Payment is encrypted end-to-end — we never see your card.

Instant download

The second payment clears, your download appears right on the confirmation page — a small .zip holding the Mac and Windows builds, yours to keep with free updates.

Drag & drop install

On Mac, drop the .component into ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components and the .vst3 into …/VST3 — signed & notarised, so no security prompts. On Windows, copy the .vst3 into C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3. Step-by-step INSTALL.txt is in the zip.

Open in your DAW

Rescan plug-ins in Logic, Ableton, FL Studio, Bitwig or Studio One and it appears under Award Audio Tools. Load it, pick a preset, and you're making sound.

Mac — Apple Silicon + Intel, macOS 10.15 or newer. Windows — VST3, 64-bit, Windows 10 or newer. Stuck? Get in touch and we'll get you running.

Who makes these

It started with a gifted laptop and a copy of Live 8

Award Audio Tools is one person — not a company with a roadmap written by committee.

I'm Alex. I've been a musician most of my life, but I started producing on Ableton Live 8 — on the first laptop I ever owned, which a friend gave me. I've been buying plugins ever since. Probably too many of them.

That's where these come from. I've bought and loved a lot of plugins from a lot of great companies — and after years of that, I was ready to try my hand at the other side of it. Building from scratch meant learning a whole new skill set, and everything I'd picked up as a buyer went straight into what came out: a whole chain on a single screen, a preset bank actually worth starting from, and a sound that shows up the moment you load it. Like any good plugin, learning it is the fun part.

Every plugin here is one I use on my own tracks. They're made for musicians and for the wider art community — the people actually making things — rather than for a spec sheet.