HOW TO USE THE YMCK MAGICAL 8-BIT PLUGIN WITH ABLETON

INTRO

Magical 8bit Plug is the perfect NES style chiptune plugin. It is awesome at authentically recreating the sound of the NES sound chip.

But to get it going in Ableton on Mac OSX proved a bit tricky. So here I will detail all the pitfalls I encountered and how to get it up and running.

ESSENTIALS

  1. You must have a 64bit version of Ableton (Live 10 works), 32bit will not work.

  2. The Universal Binary version of Magical 8-Bit plugin for Mac

SET UP

  1. Once you have downloaded the plugin, unzip it and find the magical8bitPlug.component file.

  2. Copy and paste this into your Components directory where you keep your plugins. (My directory is located SSD > Library > Audio > Plug-Ins > Components)

  3. Open Ableton and goto Preferences

  4. Under the File/Folder tab make sure Use Audio Units is on

  5. Rescan your plugins

  6. Everything should be setup now so close the Preferences window

  7. You should now see an Audio Units folder along with your VST folder in the Plug-ins pane in the top left of the main Ableton interface

  8. Expand Audio Units and you should see YMCK, expand this and you should see magical8BitPlug

  9. Drag this in or double click and you are good to go

TROUBLESHOOTING

If the plugin still doesn’t appear you can try this.

  1. Download the PPC version of the plugin here

  2. Follow the steps in Set Up

  3. At Step 8 you should see magical8bitPlug now

  4. Now replace the PPC component file with the original Universal Binary version component file

  5. Rescan your plugins in Preferences

  6. Now try dragging the plugin onto a track

VIBRATO NOT WORKING?

The plugin window shows vibrato settings but you will quickly learn that tweaking these will do nothing!

However don’t fret, all you need to do is apply modulation using your mod wheel (or draw it in the modulation envelope) and the vibrato will magically work.

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