MEqualizer

Good EQ with special features (adding harmonics to bands, saturation). The most important: You can use it for M/S or L/R eqing, have advanced visualized help and you got a 'Dry/Wet' mix knob for parallel eqing. But it also has some disadvantages as described in a minute.

Free M/S Equalizer are not easy to find, which makes MEqualizer a great opportunity, if you haven't got a M/S Equalizer in your arsenal yet.

Now, there are also some disadvantages immediately connected to that. You can adjust specific bands to process either the Mid, Side or both (Mid/Side) - (which is a very cool feature, and even some of my paid plugins can't do) -, but on the other hand you are limited to 6 bands for both, the Mid and the Side channel.

Comparing that to other known M/S or L/R plugins, where you have up to 8 bands per Mid and Side or Left or Right (up to 16 bands in total), this is very limited.

Now Melda states in the manual/tips of the plugin, that if you want to do so, you just need to have to 2 instances of MEqualizer in serial, one instance processing the Mid and one the Side signal, but for me as consumer that really doesn't hit the spot as I'm used to do that inside of one and only plugin, and not two. Always switching between both is a no-no for me, and I rather use a different EQ in the place of MEqualizer then, if I need a more flexible M/S EQ.

Another thing is that the behavior is a little weird when soloing a specific band through the in-depth floating window. The problem is that it doesn't solo a band actually as rather disables all other filters. That's not what you want to do when soloing a band. If soloed, I want to hear the specific band isolated and not the unaffected bands as well.

You still have a secondary option to isolate a band by setting "Auto-Listen" on and clicking on the band's cutoff point in the visualization, but for this you need to hold down the left-mouse click to keep the band isolated and you also could change the frequency cutoff and gain, if the mouse moves while holding down, which is a little incomfortable.

Other things about the plugin:

Bad:

- Visualization very little in the free version (you need to upgrade the free bundle for 49$ to be able to resize the inferface)
- Values of the bands in the main window are too light and small and not very good to see.
- High-and Lowpass-Filter only available in 6dB and 12dB per octave.
- Seems to Capture the key commands to your DAW.

Good:

- Auto-Gain Compensation available.
- You can add upper Harmonics to every single band.
- Visualized help areas (f.e. detecting corresponding notes / instrument layout)
- Add Saturation for a more musical sound.
- Switching between each band's floating window for in-depth parameters is easy - just jump between numbers in the top bar there.

Resume:

A good and helpful tool for being free. It can not really compete with other (paid) M/S plugins because it simply is very limited regarding its bands and in the matter not being flexible enough, plus missing clean and comfortable solo, but for anyone who hasn't something similar it might be very good option.

For me personally because of its special features - the Dry/Wet knob for parallel eqing, the visualized note areas and switching between Mid, Side or Mid/Side per band easily - I will come back to it if I need it and keep it in my box.