I’ve been working on an audio restoration project that’s helped me to discover new ways to use my existing tools. The one that I simply can’t live without is the Volume Logic plug-in for iTunes made by OCTiV software. Let me explain why.

I have a 23 year old reel-to-reel demo tape from a garage band I played bass guitar for in the early 1980s. Three of us were song writers and each had a couple of tunes on this tape. I thought I should digitize this work before it turned to dust.

One of the biggest challenges was finding a reel-to-reel player. Fortunately one of my coworkers had access to the mammoth Ampex ATR-700 that strains the back just to look at it. But it was in working condition, and I was in business.

My set up was simple. I plugged a Griffin PowerWave into a 1 GHz PowerBook, then connected the Ampex to the PowerWave. I used Rogue Amoeba’s versatile Audio Hijack Pro to grab the audio and save it to my hard drive as AIFF files. I like Hijack for lots of reasons, but the effects plug-ins are fabulous — from the 10-band equalizer, to VU meters, to noise filters.

And even though the Maxell (gold box) tape had withstood the test of time, between its age and that of the Ampex, I couldn’t quite get the sound I wanted. Until that is, I loaded the digitized music into iTunes and ran it through the Volume Logic processor.

Volume Logic is a plug-in for iTunes that enables real time digital re-mastering. Until recently, I used it to enhance the songs I listened to on my PowerBook. With it, you can control volume, drive, and bass boost. But it also has a set of magic equalizers that are phenomenal.

I found that by using the Loud! setting along with the adjustments for drive and bass boost, I could finally achieve the sound I was yearning for. But I wanted to do more than just enjoy this music on my PowerBook. I wanted to create master CDs to share with my fellow musicians.

Then it dawned on me that I could reprocess the music by running it through Volume Logic. Since I now had AIFF files, I could hijack them again from iTunes (running Volume Logic) to create better sounding masters. What a difference!

The Volume Logic plug-in is available for both Mac and Windows. It costs $20 and is worth every penny… even if you aren’t trying to salvage the music from your first rock and roll band.