Originally intended for the subtle nudging of slightly off-tune performances into place, artists like T-Pain and Cher largely popularized the extreme use of the tool to give vocals that classic hard tuned effect that we know so well in modern pop. In this blog post, we’ll list 8 of the best autotune plugins you should be using this year. Since it was the original product, autotune became the household term for any form of pitch correction, even when a different tool is used. This allowed it to recognize a note being sung and move it to the nearest semitone.

It combined a pitch detection algorithm with pitch-shifting algorithms. The company Antares released the first version of its legendary pitch correction software in 1997.

Autotune plugins are now a pretty household term, but in reality, it’s the name of a specific product.