THIS YEAR'S WINNERS!

Each year in the January issue, EM’s editors acknowledge the best gear—both hardware and software—from the past 12 months. Although 2009 may have been a down time economically for many, end-users had plenty to be happy about, especially on the software side. Most of the major DAWs had significant upgrades, and a few new ones emerged. Modeling software continued to become more sophisticated, with several very solid guitar-amp-and-effects modelers being introduced or upgraded during 2009. It was an especially good year for signal-processing plug-ins, with so many to choose from that we ended up with a tie in that category.

Overall, we found deserving products in 22 separate categories including, for the first time, Apple iPhone music apps. The process of choosing the award winners was based not only on the judgment of EM’s regular edit staff, but also on input from a select group of our writers and contributing editors.

To be eligible for the awards, products had to have shipped between 
Oct. 1, 2008, and Oct. 1, 2009. Those that shipped too close to the deadline to be sufficiently evaluated were moved to next year’s eligibility pool.

So without further ado, now we get into the fun part: the awards themselves. We present them here, alphabetized by category name (below and to the left).