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Favorite Freeware FX Thread


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12 hours ago, Max Arwood said:

it took a while to find the thread even with search

Good on ya for taking the trouble to find it and put the bump on.

I happen to have another nice giveaway, this one from our friend Boz Millar of Boz Digital.

It was actually released a couple of days ago, it's designed to ease the psychological effects of isolation. It's a virtual companion for the studio, uses AI technology to mimic human behavior:

Boz Digital Labs Studio Companion

Make sure to hit the button for "Live" mode. I found out that interesting effects may be achieved by clicking on a companion icon before another has finished its output.

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These should all be 64-bit:

Chorus: Azurite by Distorque. Incredible sounding and flexible.          

Clipper: Free Clip by Venn Audio. I don't use clippers all the time, but for the limited use I have I don't see any point in having anything but this.

Opto comp: SLAX by Sonic Anomaly. Nice and simple LA-2Aish compressor.

Leveling Tool by AdHd Audio Tools. Variety is nice, though this one has a bit of high-end roll off.

Distortion/Fuzz: Face Bender and Rangebastard by Distorque. I don't record a lot of guitar any longer, but when I did it was hard not reach for one of these on every track.

Limiter: LoudMax by Thomas Mundt. K.I.S.S. principle in action.

Metering: K-Meter by mzuther. Sometimes you just need a big meter, yeah?

Monitoring: ISOL8 by TBProAudio. Permanent resident on my mix bus.

I think the rest of my free arsenal has been covered in previous posts.

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  • 1 month later...

Here's a good bump* for the thread:

RealSpread is an interesting single-knob stereoizer plug-in by TrualityAudio. Since I love to work with nasty little mono phone recordings where someone was standing in the corner behind the drum kit, I just can't have enough stereo processing plug-ins

Truality is the brainchild of Antonakis Christoforides. a broadcast and recording engineer in Cyprus. I'm always interested to check out the results when people have psychoacoustic theories to put into practice and he has done so in the form of two plug-ins. The other is a one-knob compressor he calls

TruPressor which he also says has some psychoacoustic magic under the hood but I haven't tried it much yet except to make sure it didn't crash Cakewalk so I could post it here.

Although I was interested when I first ran across his stuff on KVR, they were both 32-bit, and we don't post 32-bit in the thread, but he has gotten busy with his Flowstone compiler and they are now both 64-bit VST2.

 

*Since this and the Freeware Instruments thread are not stickied, they become invisible unless they get bumped. It's a nice thing to do to post in this thread whenever you spot a good freebie, not just for us freeware hounds, but as a service to new users, to have the thread on the first page. Since Cakewalk doesn't come with a large number of exotic plug-ins anymore, but there are excellent ones among its freeware brethren, new users can get a faster start if they know where to find the goodies.

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I just realized that I had forgotten to post my favorite tremolo/panner, Pecheneg Tremolo.

Small plug-in house. Really cool GUI, even though the plug-in is 5 years old, I'm a sucker for that glowing diving watch thing. Lets you tune shape, symmetry and phase in continuous flow between the settings, kind of like Soundspot Nebula, if Nebula only did volume and panning.

(sorry, it's 5 years old, not 15!)

Edited by Starship Krupa
took 10 years off its age
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23 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

I just realized that I had forgotten to post my favorite tremolo/panner, Pecheneg Tremolo.

Small plug-in house. Really cool GUI, even though the plug-in is 15 years old, I'm a sucker for that glowing diving watch thing. Lets you tune shape, symmetry and phase in continuous flow between the settings, kind of like Soundspot Nebula, if Nebula only did volume and panning.

Tried about 10 times, can't the the Windows 64 bit one to download.  They must have some hosting problems.  Have blazing fast speeds on other sites.

Never downloads more than about 3 megs before stopping (expected 7.7 meg file)

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17 hours ago, Brian Walton said:

Tried about 10 times, can't the the Windows 64 bit one to download.  They must have some hosting problems.  Have blazing fast speeds on other sites.

Never downloads more than about 3 megs before stopping (expected 7.7 meg file)

You can also download this plugin at http://www.vst4free.com!

Anyways there you will find most of the free plugins and unlike to other plugin lists you can search for types, developers, newest plugins or plugin name. They also display whether the plugin is x64, linux, mac. The site does not look modern, but nevertheless IMO it is the best free plugin site!

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6 hours ago, marled said:

You can also download this plugin at http://www.vst4free.com!

Anyways there you will find most of the free plugins and unlike to other plugin lists you can search for types, developers, newest plugins or plugin name. They also display whether the plugin is x64, linux, mac. The site does not look modern, but nevertheless IMO it is the best free plugin site!

Thanks, I've picked up a number of plugins on that site over the years.  Guess that Tremolo never caught my eye previous.  Not sure why, GUI is excellent....and after trying it out, I really like it.  

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  • 4 weeks later...
  • 3 weeks later...

Bump time, 'cause I discovered a couple of sweeet FX for free.

Glitchmachines, makers of fine tools for sound design and EDM production, have a free bundle that includes a couple of plug-ins that do very strange things to audio. Fracture (buffer effect) and Hysteresis (delay effect).

I am assuming regarding Hysteresis, because I have only tried Fracture, and there was basically no way I could get it to sound anything less than extreme. I was trying it on some vocal phrases, just for fun seeing if I could maintain intelligibility while still having Fracture process them, and....not quite. A word here and there perhaps.

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13 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

Glitchmachines, makers of fine tools for sound design and EDM production, have a free bundle that includes a couple of plug-ins that do very strange things to audio. Fracture (buffer effect) and Hysteresis (delay effect).

I ran across those a few years ago. 😁

Very cool for experimental sounds. It's amazing how you can mangle sounds with them. For example, just try running a drum track through them. You can get some very weird spacey effects. Also try with some normal instrument sounds and you can get some very unpredictable results.

Fun stuff!

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1 hour ago, abacab said:

try with some normal instrument sounds and you can get some very unpredictable results

Yeah, so far I wouldn't put predictability of results high on their list of strengths. 😄

They're the sort of processor that one fiddles about with, comes up with something really interesting-sounding, then quickly saves a preset, because there ain't NO way of retracing those steps.

Not like "I hear some slapback on this, let's see, about 75mS, 20% feedback...." More like, "I'd like to blow the mind of someone listening to this on a good sound system in the dark. Let's see what happens if I put Fracture on it and start twiddling knobs."

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On 7/4/2020 at 2:32 PM, Starship Krupa said:

Not like "I hear some slapback on this, let's see, about 75mS, 20% feedback...." More like, "I'd like to blow the mind of someone listening to this on a good sound system in the dark. Let's see what happens if I put Fracture on it and start twiddling knobs."

Yup! Exactly! 🤣🤣🤣

 

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  • 5 weeks later...
  • 4 weeks later...

IIRC, Senderspike is a Cakewalk user who has posted on this forum, too, so probably gonna work well in CbB.

I just realized today that one of my fave freeware plug-in producers had never been mentioned in this thread, and it's over due for a bumpity, so:

Check out ljkb Plugins. Their most famous product is probably the knob parametric known as Luftikus. They also entered a look-alike of the ProChannel Quadcurve EQ for the KVR Contest a couple years back.

Their most ambitious, and I think unique in the freeware world, project is QRange, a 12-band linear phase paragraphic complete with realtime analyzer and mid-side capability.

Luftikus spent some time as my favorite master bus EQ, and may make it back there. QRange is a great complement to the non-linear phase EQ's in my quiver of FX.

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  • 1 month later...

I just discovered Analog Obsession, a developer with a deep collection of compressors, EQ's, and channel strips.

Some of them emulate specific classic hardware, some not. They have an LA-2A and an SSL bus compressor, both with expanded features beyond strict emulation.

I was also pleased to see that they are earning $1,400 a month from Patreon subscribers.

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