[Other] My entire free plug-in library
Free VST Plug-in list
Welcome, reader.
In this post, I will share my full free audio plug-in list of plug-ins I have downloaded and/or know of. I apologise in advance, if there are some plug-ins no longer available for free. I have downloaded some that were on a discount and/or were given away. I can't really check all of the plug-ins I have, but I will try to find whether they are still free and provide links (click on underlined text).
Each plug-in will have a very brief description of what type of synth or effect it is. I will not get too deep into details, but hopefully it will help you decide whether to get the plug-in or not.
The plug-ins aren't provided in any particular order. There are many and I am honestly a little lazy. But I will make edits upon popular request to categorise them if necessary.
And without further-a-do:
A1AUDIO.de - A1 Trigger Gate: neat little step gate plug-in for stutters. Features adjustable step length (possible to adjust length on 2 modes - long/short step trigger), built in swing, echo and distortion.
AgusHardiman.TV - MONSTER Sax: Free saxophone library with several MIDI switch articulations. Decent for a free plug-in although it is difficult to get actual realism out of it. MONSTER instruments are all free plug-ins, quite a selection of interesting sounds. The quality is a little limited, but by no means unuseable.
AgusHardiman.TV - MONSTER Piano: I have an older version of this plug-in, which is a few different piano sounds on a minimalistic UI. It is not a Spitfire piano library that will set you back a 1000€, but I've gotten use out of them, because they are simple.
Alan Vista:
- Chau Gongs: 4 different gongs, literally as simple as that.
- Crotalinae: A set of sampled, chromatic crotales
- Thai Gongs: Tuned, chromatic gamelan-esque gongs spanning an octave. Interesting sound.
- VS Conga: 3 standard congas, 6 different sounds, one of which has internal phasing issues. Not much, but you can probably get some use out of it
- VibroMaster: Simple Vibraphone
Ample Sound:
- Ample Bass P Lite 2: Very high-grade free bass guitar sample library plug-in. Many lists describe the bass and the guitar intruments from Ample Sound to be the best of their (free) kind.
- Ample Guitar M Lite 2: High-grade acoustic guitar sample library instrument.
- Ample Percussion Cloud Drum: Great sounding chromatic cloud/tongue drum
- Couture: Decent transient shaper with bass focus.
- Inner Pitch 2: Good pitch shifter with adjustable transient pitch, musical snapping on specific semitones, a knob to maintain transients, small spectral EQ, and a delay for super washy and weird sound. (warning: ate a ton of CPU on my old laptop)
- Panagement 2: Unique take on space. Fusing lfo mod, panorama and volume in an intuitive graphical UI, to simulate distance on a 180° plane.
- Renegate: Transient exclusion/gate with sequencer.
Audiomodern:
- Filterstep: Step sequenced filter to create rhythmic colour changes. Features a random generator that constantly generates new sequences
- Panflow: Sequenced panorama, with the ability to edit curves and the features of the previous 2 plug-ins
Aurora DSP:
- FenrIR: A very unique plug-in allowing for impulse response combination/mutation. The responses that come with the plug-in are intended as cabinet sims, but you can load in any wav IR.
- Goblyn: A heavy overdrive plug-in. Not much more to say other than that it is good (and nasty).
- Liver6: Simulated guitar distortion tones from a specific device. As the website says, fenomenal leap backwards. You have presets and that is all. Funnily enough, it still seems useable.
- Unified Premplifier: In case your (guitar) signal needs a little bit of a volume boost before other processing, this can work. It does what it has in the name.
Bigcat Instruments:
- Aspen Trombone: Although to my ears, the trombone sounds more like a horn, it's a solid sounding soundbank. Simple and easy if you need that.
- Sonatina Trumpet: Frankly, not the best trumpet sound to exist. Features 4 articulations.
Blamsoft - VK-1 Viking Synthesizer: In case you are looking for something similar (but also different) to the Pulverisateur, or need a retro monophonic synth that sounds great this is the one to go for. You will not find highly complex synthesis or much of any visual feedback, but the sound makes up for it. The intarface takes a little to get used to.
BlueLab:
- BL-Ghost: Free VST spectral editor. Functions simalarly to iZotope RX (for free 😮), for reducing, removing specific frequencies in the spectrogram (warning: slams CPU, has caused a few crashes for me)
- BL-LoFi: Simple bit-crusher plugin.
- BL-PitchShift: Pitch shifter with transient boost (eats CPU for breakfast)
- BL-Precedence: Effect that delays the right or left part of the signal. Niche.
Callybeat - Hum808: 808 maker plug-in that I honestly don't like. Perhaps someone can get use out of it regardless.
chowdsp:
- BYOD: Basically a full guitar pedal FX suite in one plug-in. If you get this, you may never need other FX (depending on what you want to do). Highly recommend.
- ChowCentaur: An emulation of one very popular and saught after guitar pedal. Nice overdrive tone, going from subtle to very audible.
- ChowKick: A simple kick design synth. I miss the ability to create more complex kicks and adding distortion, however one can get nice, clean sine kicks out of the synth.
- ChowMatrix: A very crazy tree based delay plug-in that I can't even truly describe. Get it and hear it for yourself.
- ChowTapeModel: An emulation of everything lo-fi tape. Lossy sound, chew, degradation, wow, flutter, the subtle pitch shifts of uneven motors. Everything adjustable. Amazing plug-in for that lo-fi feel.
Crow Hill - Vaults: A perpetually updating assembly of instruments inside one host plug-in, just like Spitfire's Labs (or what they once were).
CWITEC - TX16Wx: Highly complex sampler. Takes time to understand. Watching a tutorial is mandatory, lol.
Decidedly - Decent Sampler: The most decent of all samplers. The forever free "Kontakt" with plenty of free, high quality libraries provided by its creators and communities like pianobook.
Denis Tihanov - OrilRiver: Nice algorithmic reverb. Gets huge. Uh... That's it.
Digital Suburban - Dexed: One of the most popular free synths that appears in lists. However, I have not yet taken the time to learn how to use it. Apparently modelled after the good old Yamaha DX7.
Dr. Audio - NeuralNote: Transcribes recorded or imported audio into MIDI information.
DSK Asian DreamZ: Library of a few asian instruments. Not the most professional library, but useable regardless.
- Creepy Piano 3 Lite - Several piano sounds with possible vinyl, rain and other fx additions, plenty of reverb, delay and plenty of spooks. Fairly decent.
- Haunted Guitar Lite - Spooky electric guitar instrument. Several tones, added distortion knob and several fx. It is OK. Haven't found a use yet.
- Horror Box 2 (there is likely v3 at this point) - creepy synth. Have not yet found a use.
UnitedPlugins - United Free Plugins: A bundle of several kinds of effects. Lots of distortion and dynamic processors.
Forever89 - Visco: Super unique looking and sounding sample modelling drum machine plug-in for squishy, viscous sounds. The demo features the full instrument and only asks you to support the creator upon start.
Freakshow Industries (allows you to legally "steal" plug-ins):
- Dumpser Fire: Is a weird, washy and ghastly sounding pitch shifter/pitch delay(?!) plug-in with on-brand freakish design.
- MISHBY: A tape deck/recorder emulation plug-in. In a way. Features noise, bitcrushing, wobble, distortion, a filter you can turn off if you want to break a heart, a parasite for which you can turn its self-care down, a glitch module, and horrors. Lots of horrors.
- PocketDimension: A weird X/Y pad interface granulator plug-in, with a few lfo-able parameters. Hold down the illuminaty eye to cause interdimensional agony (grain delay glitches).
- Bucket ONE: Interesting FM synth with buttons and numbers representing what sound you are getting. It's difficult to get to any intentional sounds, but you will stumble across some nice ones regardless.
- Scroo: Spectral formant synthesizer. Again, I don't quite understand this one. But you can get cool sounds from it.
- WhispAir: Wavetable synth with 3 oscillators. Sometimes crashes Ableton for some reason though.
Fuse Audio Labs - VREV-666: Spring reverb with a very straight-forward UI.
Glitchmachines:
- Hysteresis: Grain/glitch delay.
- Fracture: Buffer effect for musical glitches, choppy repetitions, delays, and robotic artifacts.
- Cesium: Wonky phaser/chorus plug-in that gets fairly extreme. Also cool UI design
- Tungsten: Delay effect allowing for tape-like huge feedbacks and sound similar to a spring.
- CT-0W0 Computer Cowbell: For the Phonk producers. A tuned (and tuneable) cowbell synth inspired by the TR-808 cowbell. Can be turned into a polyphonic synth. Honestly, I love it.
- CT-BB01 basicbits: A chiptune wavetable synth allowing for designing wavetables 1 bit at the time. Also allows for glitch options.
- CT-BB02 bufferbytes: Synth that loads generated sounds into a buffer that loops it during the time you hold the note. There are multiple buffer slots and each note press acts a little differently, which makes for an unpredictable experience.
- CT-M02 mains: As far as I can tell, it's a monosynth emulating an oscilloscope electrical test unit. It aims to recreate the noise, the hum, the interference. Basically, it is a noisy sine wave synth you can adjust into other noisy and harsh waveforms and sync up the interference to the tempo among other things. I'm a fan.
- CT-WG2: Is a synth that uses an X/Y screen to run through several kinds of waveforms. There are transient samples that you can add in, a few modulation parameters, a delay (a common feature in most of these plug-ins) and a few other things. Can be put into mono or poly mode.
- CT-WS1: A imaginary 2-voice circuit-bend toy piano. One can get some gnarly sounds out of it. Or just use the basic sound presets of the toy. Quite fun.
- greatwall: Is a harsh noise generator with the quintessential harsh resonance knob and several stages of distortion and mangling. Allows for monophonic pitched playing.
- ill.logic+maths: Is a logic gate monosynth allowing for FM/PM synthesis on 2 oscillators, that it compares and creates a sound from that and math equations you can dial in.
- ktso: Basically a xylophone with multiple sound stages you can dial in, a mysterious look and very lush sound. Hard to explain, I recommend exploring.
- nuxx: Bizarre acid synth. I haven't found a use for it. A little niche.
- ouch!: A hard dance kick synth. In case you need super harsh kicks for uptempo, hardcore, speedcore, this is a workstation to consider.
- psykick: Another kick synth inspired by psytrance. Clicky, simple, but has a lot of changeable parameters and has found quite a lot of use on my part.
- real animal: Really complex synth I have not been able to learn. Has multiple voices that result in huge pads. Can't really say more about it.
- sota: Mono saw/square synth that has multiple filter stages that change the sound, including ring modulation, rectifiers and so on.
- virtuaDub: Dub siren synth. Does what it says. Has a delay included.
- FogPad: Multichannel reverb plug-in with nebulous control names. Lush and a little odd, with an lfo and filter stage.
- Rechoir: Pitch delay plug-in that aims to harmonize with the input signal.
- Amalgame: Multi-effect plug-in for creating effect chains and making LFO modulation easier. Has all the basic effects one needs. Good deal.
- Antagone: 2 delay lines that can get modulated in weird, freaky ways. Lime most of the developer's plug-ins, it includes a randomizer button if you're lazy and or curious.
- Bref: Generative FM percussion synthesis plug-in. You click a button and get a random sound. You can't really do much more. Good enough for some use cases.
- Cruelle: Combining distortion, feedback and a kind of filter modulation to create aggressive tones from the original signal,
- Ephemere: Glitchy FM Synth drum machine. Lots of randomization possibilities and harsh, weird drum sounds. If you want a twist on the regular old drums, this might be a good thing to download.
- GorgonV2: Complex, super agressive distortion plug-in from which you can get a ton of coulorful sounds.
- Incipit: Triple pitch-shifting delay plug-in. Great for metallinc pitch shifting, robot sounds and regular delay. Plenty of possible sounds to explore.
- Interstice: Another interesting delay plug-in. You can get very strange sounds out of it, pitched, ring-modulated, distorted or turn it into a reverb-adjacent effect by turning the diffusion up.
- Lencinates: A 3 oscillator drone synth with evolving architecture over time.
- Litote: Crazy granulator delay plug-in.
- Regressif: Wild delay-like effect that mangles the input signal in various ways.
Hollace/Infernal Love - The Kiss of Shame: Magnetic tape degradation emulation plug-in.
Insert Piz Here - Harsh Digital Nose: Converts images you can load into the plugin, or draw right inside of it, into 2 oscillators that then get mangled in different ways. One can add a normal oscillator with 4 different waveforms into the mixIt's loud and noisy and abrasive and an essential tool for noise musicians.
Kazrog - KClip Zero: Basic clipper. Highly regarded. Features a whopping 3 knobs, but it doesn't need more, because it sounds good.
Keisari Studios - Leikkaus: Another acclaimed free clipper. Shaves off transients smoothly without distortion until pushed to extremes.
Keolab - Spicy Guitar: Synth recreating acoustic guitars through physical modelling. A nice feature is the chord detection that strums the chord you played. Only thing missing are noises for realism and a little more decay on the strings.
Klevgrand:
- SantaJussi: Male vocal format synth shaped in the form of a Santa. A true Christmas gift.
- Svep: Stereo modulation plug-in that allows you to go from chorus to insane.
- SyndtSphere: An interesting synth where you explore a sphere of sounds that blend between each other.
Lostin70s - Harmonus: Sampled harmonium. Not much else to it.
Maizesoft - Sonatina Xylophone: Sampled orchedstral xylophone for the bigcat rompler. Does not provide reverb removal, the sample library was recorded wet. Good sound, but some unfulfilled potential. It's very lightweight however, won't eat your CPU.
MANDA Audio - MT-PowerDrumKit 2: While it doesn't sport a crazy amount of sound options, it is one of the best sounding, simple studio drum kits you can find for free. You can set up individual outputs for your DAW.
Meat Beats - Orbhits: E-mu Orbit 9090 emulation rompler. Has a large library of pristine sounding classic dance music basses, stabs, hits, pads, leads and chords. Features inbuild reverb, some kind of autopan modulation, attack and relase knobs. Discovered some essential EDM sounds on there.
MeldaProduction - MFreeFXBundle: The full suite of all the essential effect tools you need. Nothing more to say. It's everything regularly used for music in a free bundle. I can't recommend it enough.
Michael Willis - Dragonfly Reverb Bundle: Very popular bundle of reverb effects. I have not yet truly put them to the test in an actual track, but all of the reverbs have a large amount of adjustable parameters and a good, distinct sound. Includes an algorithmic room verb, a plate, a hall, and a designer for algorithmic early reflections that sounds quite unique.
midilab - JC303: Open source Roland TB-303 bassline emulation. While it sounds a little different and is missing the programable sequence features that are so iconic, the synth is still being actively developed by the community and from all free emulations available, this is the most faithful. In case you are an audiotooler missing the good old in the stu, it's here.
JonET - MonkSynth: Something I was searching for for a long time. Since the old VST version was no longer supported, I could not use AudioNerdz's Delay Lama in Ableton. Fortunately, a set of wonderful people aimed to recreate the legendary vowel transient synth in VST3 form and released MonkSynth. Now I can run a singing delay lama in Ableton and recreate that Scary Monters and Nice Sprites video. A blessing.
Monkwind DSP - Complete Monkwind Effect Bundle: Features tools for extreme distortion aimed for drums, dynamic removal, several types of intense, but suprisingly good pitch shifting algorithms, a saturator, compressor/saturator, pitch delay/shifter, 32 band filter thing to make stuff sound underwater (actual description), more pitch shifting and a robotic stereo widener.
Morbid Electronics - Ring of Saturn: Ring modulator with additional chorus. That is about it. While the UI design is interesting... the plug-in not that much tbh. But if you want a ring mod, this is a ring mod.
Native Instruments - Komplete Start: The starting point of free effects and sample libraries provided by the renowned company itself. Personally use a lot of their stuff often. Some tools come and go, but the current mainstays are:
- Guitar Rig (7): Guitar rack effects. 2 different amps and 2 matched cabinets, several different effects ranging from distortion, to EQ, a gate and many other essentials.
- Supercharger: analog tube compressor. Nice and punchy, great sound.
- Raum: Algorithmic reverb plug-in. Great clean, full and lush sound. I end up returning to this one more often.
- Replika: Wonderfully clean delay/reverb plug-in that I often turn to.
- iZotope Ozone EQ: Industry quality EQ plug-in with plenty of features.
- Kontakt & extensive library: Probably the best known sampler plug-in out there.
- Obliterate: Distortion with 2 built-in filters. For intense, but useable tones. Looks to be great for hard kick creation, haven't tried it though.
- Pendulate: Double pendulum inspired monosynth including a wavefolder folding the sound of the 2 oscillators on itself and including a low pass gate. The synth has a very characteristic sound. Personally recommend it a lot.
- Hematohm: Frequency shifter with LFO mod features. Easy to create freakish sounds, weird risers and such.
- Mobilohm: multi-stage phaser that does far more than just phase. You can get crazy rhythmic frequency shifts from it and more.
- OhmBoyz: Delay with glitchy features. The main point of interest being the easily accessible runaway delay feedback that could easily cause tinnitus if you're not careful.
- Ohmicide: Very variable mutiband distortion. Gets extremely gnarly when you turn up the feedback. Unfortunately, I'm not sure the plug-in is still available for free.
- Ohmygod: Ring modulator that feedbacks back into itself to which you can then add a dsitortion. The feedback has a filter with resonance that you can turn up to self resonate (and burst your eardrums). It also allows you to assign an LFO to most knobs. As with most ohmforce plug-ins, be careful when turning up the resonance and feedback.
- Predatohm: Is a 4 band distortion with once again, feedback filter options. So far I haven't quite been able to do much with it except for making sure I will have hearing problems later in life. Be careful using it and turn the volume down.
- Symptohm/Symptohm PE: explained to be a 2-oscillator, granular & sample based synth with a sub oscillator and a noise generator, plus, a lot of different presets, as well as 4 frohmage filters. You can also modulate parameters using the LFO or envelope.
Plogue Art et Technologie - Alter Ego: The one and only free vocaloid synthesizer. There are 3 free voice banks for download. Very strong for a free vocaloid that runs in your DAW, but the programming is a bit of a hassle. Either way, this is the best free and most comprehensive option.
Plugdata/plugdata-fx: Plugdata is a visual plug-in creation and hosting environment. If I knew more about DSP I would describe it more in detail, but I don't. All I know is that people seem to like plugdata and it's pretty cool that there are options for easier DSP programming if you don't want to take the time and code everything.
Ewan Bristow (these eat CPU, just a warning):
- EB-CatNip: Frequency shifting delay with built in modulation tools, a chaos button, randomizer and pre-delay spectral gate. Allows for squelchy, wet sounds and very weird noises for sound-designers to enjoy.
- EB-SpectralDelay: Multiband delay - enables you to put delay on any of the 15 bands. Once again it includes a spectral gate and in addition a reverb. I'm certain there have been updates to it, but my version seems to be kind of broken in terms of UI. This may be an issue on certain systems with a several of the dev's plug-ins. Just as a warning.
- EB-Dione: Spectral resynthesis sampler. Simply a sampler that works on the basis of taking a short section of a sound and then looping it. You can then apply some frequency shifting, ott and such. Through browsing through the sample you can basically immediately make insane squelchy wavetable-ish sounds. Basically an instant dubstep bass generator. Only runs on strong machines. My version is partially broken.
- EB-Meow: Cat that dances to input signal. Not sure how you're supposed to make it sing, but that should also be possible.
- EB-FreakyTable: Spectral filter that works on the basis of making wavetables out of samples you can load in. The input is then filtered by the created wavetable. There is also a noise mode, that adds "automatic" movement to the filter. Changes the input sound a lot. Best for complex dubstep basses.
- EB-SpectraVeil: Morphing spectral frequency shifter/stretcher you can sync up to the project tempo and let it warp your sounds around. Mine once again doesn't seem to work the way it's supposed to.
Plugin Alliance/Braiworx:
- Ampeg SVTVR Classic: Quite certain I got this for free, but it no longer shows up as a free plug-in on the website. Relatively simple bass amp emulation. It sounds OK, I guess. I haven't really used it yet.
- bx_cleansweep: Filter that morphs fluidly between lowpass-"bandpass"-highpass that you can control via a joystick. You can turn lowpass or highpass off. The filter does not have resonance control.
- bx_masterdesk: Analog mastering station. Features the obvious volume increasing capabilities with limiting, tone controls (EQ), some resonance filters and de-esser (not the classic version, although only that seems to be free now).
- bx_oberhausen: Analog synth emulation. No longer seems to be available for free, but it used to. IMHO you won't miss out on much though.
- bx_rockrack V3 Player: Not even really worth the mention, although it is a useable amp emulation IG. This is the demo version thing, so all you can actually do is load in presets (that sound fine) and change the gain.
- bx_solo: Plug-in for mid/side monitoring, increasing and stereo width. That is basically everything. I have an older version that is quite limited, the newer design seems to feature more flexibility (but not much). Can be simply replaced by other plug-ins in the list.
- bx_subfilter: Subbass frequency filter promising to help clean up the low end and add power back to transients. Not a lot of control, but upon testing it made my low end pop better.
- elysia niveau filter: Filter/EQ emulation. Has a whopping 2 knobs. Supposed to balance out low-end and high-end.
- SPL Free Ranger: Graphical EQ emulation with 5 fixed bands you can't. Meh. At least you don't get option paralysis and don't have too much visual indication if that's something you need.
Polyverse Music - Filtron: Simple filter plug-in that allows to smoothly morph between lowpass/bandpass/highpass. Also sports an overdrive distortion. That is it and it's plenty sufficient.
PSP Audioware - PianoVerb: Tuned-ish reverb simulating the reverberations of piano strings. You can tune and detune it. Fairly simple but it has a lot of character.
Rex Basterfield/quilcom:
- Quilcom Ghost Radio: Creepy background noise thing that looks like a radio. You can switch between radio channels to get different disturbing background stuff and turn up this weird ghastly speech. It includes filtering. Not sure what the use case would be, but it's kinda fun.
- SIM-Didge: Didgeridoo simulation. No real pitch control (like on the real instrument). Includes percussion mouth stuff you can sync up to the project BPM and formant control.
Robbert van der Helm (most of my stuff is broken and unuseable, but they're interesting) [I also stole the descriptions, because at this point I am far too lazy]:
- Buffr Glitch: MIDI triggered buffer repeat plugin. When you play a note, the plugin will sample the period corresponding to that note's frequency and use that as a single waveform cycle. This can end up sounding like an in-tune glitch when used sparingly, or like a weird synthesizer when used less subtly.
- Crisp: Adds a bright crispy top end to any low bass sound. Kind of like a frequency specific distortion, but not distortion. Exciter?
- Crossover: Cleanly splits the signal into two to five bands using a variety of algorithms. Those bands are then sent to auxiliary outputs so they can be accessed and processed individually.
- Diopser: Phase rotation effect. Makes everything sound very lazery. Pretty cool.
- Loudness War Winner: We've had an effect like this here before. Makes the original signal nice and award-winningly loud :).
- Puberty Simulator: Totally super stable frequency shifter.
- Safety Limiter: As soon as there is a peak above 0 dBFS or the specified threshold, the plugin will cut over to playing SOS in Morse code, gradually fading out again when the input returns back to safe levels.
- Soft Vacuum: Vacuum tube distortion recreation with oversampling.
- Spectral Compressor: Got recommended by Au5. Can squash anything into pink noise, apply simultaneous upwards and downwards compressor to dynamically match the sidechain signal's spectrum and morph one sound into another, and lots more. Have you ever wondered what a 16384 band OTT would sound like?
Softube - Saturation knob: Saturation. One knob. That is kind of it.
+ I have more actually good stuff from them, but it was likely all added to subscriptions or as bundled software, because I can't find any official free versions. Look out for sales/give aways for the Drawmer S73, the Softube VCA or the Tube Delay. Those sound actually good.
Soifer Sound - Sample Swap: Free drum replacement sampler. In case your snare on a live kit sounds like cheeks, you can add this onto the track, select a sample you want to replace the sound with and it will replace the sound. You can mix in levels dry/wet, define the threshold and hold. Not the greatest drum replacement sampler in existence, but it's great for a free one.
Somerville Sounds - Prototype Meyer Choir: Family choir that has a specific sound, but very little in terms of controls. Decent sound though and a lot of character.
Sonic Anomaly - Transpire: Transient shaper I tend to use.
Sonic Anomaly - QuadraCom: 4-band dynamics processor for mix bus and mastering. I didn't even know I had this.
Wavosaur - VSTSpeek3: Simple S.A.M. speech synth recreation that runs in the DAW.
Spitfire Audio:
- BBC Symphony Orchestra Dicover: A full symphonic orchestra for free in a relatively lightweight plug-in. It's incredible and I love it and if you don't have it yet, get it! End of discussion.
- LABS: Our beloved before it got bought by Splice. As long as it still is... even in this weird, deformed and abused way... In case you still don't know, it was a free sample library collection with new additions coming frequently. Many cool instruments and an essential tool for producers. All entirely for free. Linking it to Splice here.
Steven Slate - SSD Sampler5 Free: Acoustic drum kit often featured in lists. Since I have other kits now I got from discounts, I don't use it, but it's a very realistic kit with every necessary mixing and mapping option.
Surge Team - Surge XT & Surge Effects: Quite a quintessential open source hybrid synth. Many different synthesis types, plenty of modulation options, macros, envelopes, LFOs, changeable skins and I've 100% taken the time to actually explore and understand this synth (lies). Oh yeah, also, neat effects come in a separate plug-in.
Tal-Togu Audio Line:
- TAL-Filter 2: Modulation plug-in for filter, volume & panorama modulation, even in the stereo field. Allows you to draw custom curves. Wonderfully useful.
- TAL-Noisemaker: Analog PM/FM synth with 2 oscillators, a sub oscillator, a TAL-modulator just like the TAL-Filter and ring modulation, built-in chorus, reverb and delay.
- TAL-Reverb: Plate reverb I've used a few times. Sounds nice and big (and platey).
- TAL-Vocoder 2: Analog inspired vocoder. Used to be fairly popular.
- GSat+: Tube saturator/clip distortion. Easily my favourite distortion. It's fairly simple but sound great. It has 2 stages - saturation with even and odd harmonics, that go from very subtle to punchy and a clipper with a ceiling knob for great sounding clip distortion. Plus you can switch between stereo/mono and monitor mid/side as well. Includes 2x/4x oversampling.
- mvMeter2: Multimeter tool including VU, RMS, Peak standard, EBUR, PPM presets. You can manually adjust the metering options as well. Also includes multiple nice skins. Perhaps more of a visually appealing plug-in than analytical, but perhaps that is a reductive statement from a layperson.
Tokyo Dawn labs:
- TDR Kotelnikov: Wideband compressor. Not much more to it. You can set up a low-end relax (to which degree it effects the low-end), you can adjust the stereo sensitivity, and increase the dry/wet mix if you want. It's capable of doing nice and subtle dynamic processing and visually helps with adjusting make-up gain. Also includes a delta function (audition of what's being reduced) and you can theoretically leave it on as a gate - sounds nice on drums.
- TDR Nova: The best free EQ out there, in my humble opinion. It's a spectral dynamic 4 band EQ. Functions like most spectral EQ where you can freely move aroun with each band. For every band, you can also set up a gain reduction threshold and ratio, making for multiband dynamic processing. It allows you to solo bands, turn on GR delta and has a dry/wet knob as well as changing a few display options.
- TDR Prism: Very pretty frequency spectrum analyzer with several layers you can turn on and off and settings to check accuracy even within an approximation of human perceives loudness. You can switch between peak and rms on every layer individually.
UJAM - FINISHER-MICRO: 2 knob multi-effect thing. One knob to browse and change the effect and one to increase or decrease the amount of... effect. No other options to find. Weird (not in a good way), even a little pointless.
- UA 610 Tube Preamp: Tube preamp emulation with decent warmth. Doesn't do much, but the slight overdrive sounds nice.
- UA 610 Tube EQ: Basically the same as the effect above, but with 2 EQ bands.
- UA 1176 Classic FET compressor: THE emulation of the 1176. For fast compression on drums or vocals, bringing out the tail (for example). I almost always use one in vocal chains.
- Teletronix LA-2A Tube Compressor: Another emulation of a legendary compressor. No reason not to get it imho.
- Vibe Analog Machines Essentials: 4 different tape distortion emulations, with only the drive knob and switching between types as parameters.
- UAD Showtime '64 Tube Amp: Amp simulation giving you the option to select a few different micing techniques, increase the room mix, mix in vibrato, adjust the tone with bass, treble, gain and intensity (the usual). If you want some vintage sound, this is vintage sound. Not sure how good it truly is, but the sound isn't bad.
- Century Tube Channel Strip: Tube channel strim simulation. Has a preamp that can add some nice color. You can invert phase, turn on PAD reduction, switch between mic & line input. The EQ is a simple 3 band one with a low and high shelf and one peak curve in the mids. Also features an optic compressor with nothing more than an amount knob. Not the worst nor the best channel strip I have.
- PolyMax Synth: "Retro" polyphonic synth (you can switch to mono), with several modulatable parameters (modulate by lfo and envelope), 2 oscillators, 1 noise oscillator, FM, a few built in effects, unison, filter with keyboard tracking, pitch mod and such. All the important features. I don't really use it, but it sounds nice.
- CRMBL: Wildly versatile delay. Has the usual features - syncable time, feedback you can turn up to near infinity (without self-distorting), dry/wet and a ping-pong knob. What it also has however, is a pitch knob you can set to snap (semitones) or not, a chew parameter (messes with the pitch), a reverse option to reverse the delay, and a time modulation knob. The result is chewy, skrewed, weird feedback that is only a distant cousin of delay.
- Diet Audio: Spectral gate that separates the transients from the rest of the signal. Creates very interesting tones and artefacts that resemble lossy, low bit-depth MP3 audio. I recommend grabbing it.
- Magic Carpet: 3 separate delays with one feedback. You cane turn on noise mode by right clicking within the plug-in to get runaway feedback and lots of loud noise - turn the volume down. You can also randomize each parameter.
- MPaint: A video game sampler emulation. Simulates chip conversion and stuff like that. Has several popular old school sounds available. Very fun.
- Pisstortion: Fold distortion with stereo mix options and noise reduction. Still need to find a use for it, but it's pretty cool none the less. Harsh, makes kicks bouncy sounding. You can switch from sine to normal fold, also reduce it to a clipper in a way. Click on the visual to change to access those options.
- PNCH: Tightens signal. One knob gate with harmonic addition. Sounds a dirty on drums, but that might be something one's going for. Works best if there's another effect applied after.
- Prisma: Multistage multiband distortion with several kinds of effects you can put into a chain on each adjustable band. Effects include - soft & hard clip, heavy - overdrive with noise (I think), asymmetrical distortion, rectifier & stereo rectifier, fold & sine fold, zero cross, bit crushing, sample divide, ring mod, DC, stereo DC, width, pan, filters, additional dry/wet mixer and eq peak. Also has a great visual interface. One of my most used plug-ins.
- Prismon: Prisma, but global for the whole sound.
- Scope: Quite variable and customizable oscilloscope, going from simple visualization to providing good visual analysis, depending on how you set it up.
- SunBurnt: Is a very CPU heavy convolution reverb/delay with multiple modulation options and drawable curves for pre-delay, sweeps and weirdness. Personally can't really run it well, so I don't use it. Also takes time to learn.
- ValhallaFreqEcho: Bode frequency shifter combined with a delay. Makes weird flangey, psychedelic sounds. You can turn it up for runaway delay, or get more textural sounds when turning the feedback down. Switching from fixed delay times also makes cool DJ-ish spinback sounds.
- ValhallaSpaceModulator: Flanger with 11 algorithms you can set up to go from simple ensamble-chorus to doubling, to infinite risers, to extreme flanging all over the place, to frequency shifting in a way that makes drums play a chord. Wild stuff if you want that.
- Valhalla SuperMassive: Popular Algorithmic delay/reverb people swear by. Features 10 algorithms you can choose from and a lot of adjustment options. Can go from small reflections, to infinite delay walls, to subtle plate, to lush, washy space reverb.
Versillian Studio - EWHarp2 CE: Studio quality celtic harp. Sounds simply great.
Vital Audio - Vital: The free Serum replacement. Super variable spectral warping wavetable multi-synth. I don't think I have to describe this one that much. Was my most used synth for a while.
Voxengo - Span: Frequency spectrum analyzer we were told to use at school. Has several built-in presets for norms - LUFS, DBFS, EBU R, K-system metering, true peak, clipping, mid/side metering. You can set up a secondary spectrum, customize size, zoom, colours. Also allows for ultra and infrasonic metering.
Vienna Symphonic Library - VSL Free Bundle: Professional symphonic orchestra libraries with a few limitations. Haven't used it in a while, so I don't know how much it has grown or evolved or devolved... no idea.
Wave Alchemy - Magic7: Bricasti M7 simulation. Unfortunately CPU heavy on my device, but I really like the way it sounds. Plenty of preset/algorithm choices that go from reflections, to vague ambiance, to plates and huge rooms. Probably one of my favourite free reverbs.
Wavosaur & DJ CSI - Rave Generator: Classic rave stabs and samples sampler. If you make anything adjacent to rave music, this thing is a must.
Wings - Fire: Great multiband distortion with different compression, EQ and distortion effects. Let's you also use effects globally.
Xfer Records - OTT(2): The legendary over the top 3 band compressor that isn't a compressor. I really don't think I need to describe this one. OK, perhaps this will do: DUBSTEP!! DUBSTEPPPP! DUBBBBSTEPPPPPP!!!!!
YouLean Loudness Meter (Free): Popular and widely used LUFS loudness meter. Not much more to say tbh. I certainly recommend it.
Zeek - STFU!: Drawable volume curve effect that you can sync up to the project tempo and adjust the frequency. Comes out of the box meant for sidechain-esque ducking, but you can use it for various other things too.
Things I haven't mentioned:
- IK Multimedia has charity sales with humble bundle, where I got insane amounts of stuff for a large price drop. I'm a very avid user of IK SampleTank and some of the Miroslav Filharmonic instruments. IK also has the free MODO bass & MODO drums. Not too much available in the free versions, but great quality none the less.
- u-he has a few free plug-ins including the well know Tyrell synth, but also several others.
- If you subscribe to SOS magazine and stuff like that, they include free plug-ins once in a while. A Pro-Tools subscription will give you access to new bundled software frequently.
- Hardware bundle software together to make buying it more appealing 😱
In case you want to look for deals, hoard plug-ins of every kind and all that, read in on Bedroom Producer's Blog, visit websites like KVR Audio, Plugins 4 Free, audio plugins for free.com, Audio plugin deals, plugin boutique or Plugin Alliance.
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