Instance

An occurrence, case, or example of something. In the music/pro audio world, the word “instance” is used to refer to a single active or enabled plug-in opened in a DAW. For example, when you bring up a reverb in your DAW session, it’s common to say you have “opened an instance of your reverb plug-in.” As another example, you might describe the capability of your system as “being able to open six simultaneous instances of a particular convolution reverb plug-in.”