My favorite free plugins

[KuruPrionz]

This is probably everybody's favorite - Valhalla Supermassive. Great delay.

 

I'll post more soon, just did a big plugin purge. 

[KuruPrionz]

SPL Free Ranger EQ is pretty cool, a Plugin Alliance freebie.

Valhalla Space Modulator - 5 knobs, 11 modes, a ton of presets - could be the only modulation plugin you need or want. 

Synthmaster Player is free and a fun synth. 

[KuruPrionz]

One more and I've never tried it - there is a free version of MODO Drum by IK Multimedia. 

I have the full version (except for 3 new drum kits) and it's a good plugin. Free is a good price and it is one of the few IK plugins that is Apple Silicon ready and can run without Rosetta 2. 

[Jonathan Hughes]

Another vote for Supermassive (although for me, it's the reverb that make it so valuable)

Puremagnetik has a bunch of free (and very cheap) interesting reverb/delay/lofi plugins

Spitfire Labs

There are some nice free things available for Orchestral Tools Sine Player

 

[Anderton]

I mentioned this in another thread, but I love ISOL8 from TBProAudio.de because it makes it easy to do multiband processing in any DAW - you don't need a frequency splitter or crossover (which is one of my favorite Studio One features, so I want it in other DAWs as well).

 

ISOL8 is intended for diagnostic purposes, i.e., click to hear what's happening in a particular band when mixing or mastering. BUT...send audio to five buses, put one of these as an insert in each bus, and now each bus covers only the frequency range covered by the solo button in its instance of the plug-in. Then to keep things simple, group the bus faders, send the buses to another bus, or use a VCA channel to change all the bus levels at once. Multiband distortion, delay, chorus, auto-wah...it's pretty cool.

 

 

 

[RABid]

Vital is a great VST from Vital Audio. Free version is good. Paid version is great.

 

https://vital.audio

 

[Anderton]

Here's another one: Voxengo MSED. It lets you do mid-side processing with DAWs that don't have native options, like the Pro Tools Artist. Having the goniometer and correlation meter is a nice touch, too.

 

[KuruPrionz]

15 minutes ago, Anderton said:

Here's another one: Voxengo MSED. It lets you do mid-side processing with DAWs that don't have native options, like the Pro Tools Artist. Having the goniometer and correlation meter is a nice touch, too.

 

Voxengo has a good selection of free plugins. I used their Boogex a fair bit, others have replaced it but it was nice to have when I needed it. 

 

Both IK Multimedia and Native Instruments have free plugins that can be useful as well. Just surf their sites and find the free products. We are all different and have different needs so choice is up to the user. 

[Mighty Motif Max]

Didn't we have another thread on this about a year ago? At the time I put quite a list in I think...not sure if it was here or on Metlay's forum. It's amazing what you can get for free now.

[KuruPrionz]

1 hour ago, Mighty Motif Max said:

Didn't we have another thread on this about a year ago? At the time I put quite a list in I think...not sure if it was here or on Metlay's forum. It's amazing what you can get for free now.

Yes, probably so. There are lots of new free plugins, I just haven't had time to try many and I'm lazy so I ask other people. 

 

If you google "free vst plugin" there are lots of pages on various websites with just about everything that exists. 

At least some of them have to be good, right?

[Mighty Motif Max]

1 hour ago, KuruPrionz said:

Yes, probably so. There are lots of new free plugins, I just haven't had time to try many and I'm lazy so I ask other people. 

 

If you google "free vst plugin" there are lots of pages on various websites with just about everything that exists. 

At least some of them have to be good, right?

I have a boatload...over the years I've collected a bunch from limited-time offers, Black Friday freebies, holiday promo gifts, and the like, as well as bought a fair number of plugins.

 

I can't seem to find the old thread I posted in...even after an hour of looking through the last two years of my posts here. Not sure what the story is there.

 

I did find this, but this is very limited: https://forums.musicplayer.com/topic/175860-the-quotquarantine-freebiequot-thread/#comments

[KuruPrionz]

41 minutes ago, Mighty Motif Max said:

I have a boatload...over the years I've collected a bunch from limited-time offers, Black Friday freebies, holiday promo gifts, and the like, as well as bought a fair number of plugins.

 

I can't seem to find the old thread I posted in...even after an hour of looking through the last two years of my posts here. Not sure what the story is there.

 

I did find this, but this is very limited: https://forums.musicplayer.com/topic/175860-the-quotquarantine-freebiequot-thread/#comments

I had way too many, not enough time in the day to find out that they do more or less what other plugins that have similar tools will do. Which means you can get great results by listening and tweakining.

Moving to Monterey and wanting to go full Apple Silicon quite a few have been left behind. Not missing anything too much either. 

[Anderton]

15 hours ago, Mighty Motif Max said:

Didn't we have another thread on this about a year ago?

 

Yes, but people don't always go back that far, and there are always plenty of new ones to check out. If I get a chance, maybe I'll go find it and merge the threads.

[Mighty Motif Max]

3 hours ago, Anderton said:

 

Yes, but people don't always go back that far, and there are always plenty of new ones to check out. If I get a chance, maybe I'll go find it and merge the threads.

Right, although most of the focus recently has been on developers making their existing plugins work with Apple Silicon. My interest in that was that I thought that KuruPrionz and I had exchanged a lengthy list of plugins we each used, and my current list would be pretty much the same so I could just paste it here.

[KuruPrionz]

3 hours ago, Mighty Motif Max said:

Right, although most of the focus recently has been on developers making their existing plugins work with Apple Silicon. My interest in that was that I thought that KuruPrionz and I had exchanged a lengthy list of plugins we each used, and my current list would be pretty much the same so I could just paste it here.

True, but there have been some interesting new plugins as well. As far as free, Valhalla just updated SuperMassive with new features. I need to update it, that's a great free plugin. 

 

On the other hand, since I bought Eventide Split EQ, I hardly use any other EQ plugins. It does excellent "normal" EQ and many other fine things, at this point for me it's the be-all end-all EQ plug and was well worth the $70 on sale crossgrade I paid for it. I tossed a ton of EQ plugs that just didn't do enough to keep after that.