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This plugin-like technology has been gaining popularity for years, and sonible has now joined the club. Discover how ARA technology works and what advantages it has.
You probably know about the VST (or VST3) format, the plugin standard that defined how most of today’s plugins work. You might also be aware of Audio Units (AU), the standard that offers another option for Mac users and Logic Pro users. And then there’s AAX, which is a format just for Pro Tools users.
At sonible, we’ve always released our plugins in these formats. However, there’s also ARA (Audio Random Access)—not a plugin format itself, but a modern extension for existing plugin formats. ARA enables deeper integration between 3rd party tools and DAWs, offering unique benefits like instant audio analysis and non-linear editing, which go beyond what traditional formats can achieve.
We recently released prime:vocal, a powerful vocal processing tool designed to enhance the quality of vocal and speech recordings. Given its reliance on advanced signal analysis, prime:vocal was an ideal candidate for dual availability as both a standalone application and an ARA plugin—and that’s exactly what we’ve delivered.
In this article, we’ll tell you what the ARA format is, how it’s different to classical VST3, AU and AAX plugins, how it can help improve your workflow, what its advantages and disadvantages are, and what DAWs and software processors currently support this format.
prime:vocal was a great candidate for an ARA plugin because it is otherwise a standalone piece of software, and because it provides audio editing functionality that uses offline processing. Being able to instantly have a vocal audio file loaded into prime:vocal (passed from the DAW) is convenient, and then being able to have the processed vocal immediately available in your DAW (passed from prime:vocal) means there’s no audio export or rendering stage, and you get to stay in your DAW throughout the whole process of improving a vocal recording.
Standing for “Audio Random Access”, ARA is a technology for processing audio data in your DAW, and is great for applying processes like pitch editing, noise reduction and vocal processing.
While ARA processors function similarly to traditional plugins for the end user, there are some crucial differences. Traditoinal plugins operate in real time, processing only the audio that is playing back. ARA processors are able to analyze the entire audio track. Another difference is in the way they are displayed: while traditional plugins have windows with set user interfaces, ARA processors are often integrated inside its host DAW, almost as an editor panel, and may appear differently from DAW to DAW.
The ARA format was created by Celemony and Presonus, and is currently in its second major implementation (‘version 2’).
ARA plugins are loaded in a host DAW and may be displayed in different ways, depending on the DAW. Opening, say, Melodyne within Studio One (pictured below) will give you direct access to Melodyne within the DAW’s Edit panel, so you can tune the audio without moving it. In Logic Pro, you may access Melodyne through ARA within its own window, making it feel like a real-time plugin.
When an ARA plugin is added to an audio channel or clip, the DAW allows the plugin access to information about the whole channel or clip. In contrast, a regular VST, AU or AAX plugin operates in close to real time, and is only given information about what’s directly in front of it within a certain amount of samples (time).
Imagine an ARA Normalization plugin. A normalization process detects the highest peak in an entire audio signal, and applies gain to the whole track to ensure that highest peak is at 0dB, with everything else remaining relative below it. For normalization to work in a plugin, it would have to scan the entire audio track (with playback in real time) and then adjust levels accordingly. With ARA, this process is near instant as the plugin has access to the audio data for the whole track without playing it back.
If anything in the underlying audio signal changes, the ARA plugin can update its processing (gain level) immediately, whereas the plugin may be unaware that anything has happened!
With its ability to see (or ‘hear’) all audio data on the track or clip it’s placed on, an ARA plugin is able to make decisions in a more ‘offline’ way, freeing up your CPU when playing back your project.
Like with plugins, ARA processing is non-destructive, and results can (depending on the implementation) usually be rolled back and redone quite easily.
ARA offers a way to integrate larger software packages – IE, apps – like Melodyne within your DAW, without running them separately, exporting the results and importing them back into your DAW project. This means a faster workflow, sometimes radically faster, as you can preview changes to the setup right in your project.
An ARA plugin can offer more precision, an easy way to reference its channel against other audio channels, and a far simpler way to carry out certain audio tasks.
With implementations as are seen in Logic Pro, where ARA plugins appear in their own dedicated windows, the line between real-time plugin and ARA plugin is blurring even more, and many users may not notice a difference in using an ARA plugin in their DAW compared to loading up their preferred compressor or EQ plugin.
On the negative side, ARA’s implementation is up to each host DAW, so can be applied in different ways each time. This may not be problem if you only use one DAW, and likely isn’t a huge problem if you use multiple DAWs anyway, but this fact does make DAWs less likely to actually offer ARA plugins as a format, and also makes it harder for developers to release a new ARA plugin, with extra effort being needed for each release.
Since ARA connects with so much audio information – for analysis and later processing – an ARA plugin can take longer to load and prepare itself to work than a simple real-time plugin would. Real-time plugins have a long history of development, and there are best practices for plugin developers to follow, but ARA plugins are still something of a frontier for the industry.
Numerous DAWs now support ARA technology, and each implements ARA plugins in different ways. The ARA SDK has been made available as Open Source in order to encourage more developers to adopt the standard.
Various plugins support ARA technology, here are a few relevant entries…