Softube’s free Saturation Knob plugin is a modelled output distortion that can be used anywhere you need some grit. It is great for fattening up drums and bass, adding harmonics to vocals, and more. As well as a knob controlling the ammount of saturation being applied, there’s also three-way switch to access three different modes: Keep High, Neutral, and Keep Low.

These modes give you three characteristic types of distortion. If you want to squash a drum loop but keep the bass drum fairly intact, you can use Keep Low mode, while Keep High mode distorts the low end more while keeping the high frequencies relatively clean.

There are also three versions of the plugin included. Saturation Knob work as a native plugin, but also has Saturation Knob for Modular, and Saturation Knob for Amp Room variants. Saturation Knob for Modular — Softube’s virtual Eurorack platform — helps you create sensational synth sounds. Virtually patch it to modules from Doepfer, Buchla, Intellijel, and more to discover new sonic spheres. Saturation Knob for Amp Room, is Softube’s pro audio guitar and bass platform. Combine it with other studio effects, classic amps, cabs, and pedals to easily create studio-quality, record-ready tones.

Get Saturation Knob for free and add a taste of warm, analog saturation to your mixes.

With a background in industrial software engineering, Blue Cat Audio’s founder Guillaume Jeulin understands the importance of stable software. The French company offers professional audio effects, innovative audio analysis tools, and standalone applications that transform Digital Audio Workstations into professional audio processing environments. As an extra arrow in Blue Cat’s quiver, it also offers consulting and engineering services for custom software development, and as such has amassed a variety of customers, ranging from recording studios, universities and recording schools, and home studio owners, to recording engineers, and professional and amateur musicians.

The Triple EQ plugin includes a low-shelf filter, a high-shelf filter, and a boost/cut peak filter. Its wide range of gain (+/-40 dB per band) and bandwidth (.01 to 5 Octave) makes it very versatile to create any filter shape. The three filters are linked together so that when you change the centre frequency or bandwidth the parameters of the three filters are modified accordingly, meaning that you can control the entire equaliser characteristics with a single mouse click.

The graph shows the computed frequency response of the plugin, so that you can exactly know how your signal is processed. The controls are directly available on top of the filter graph, making the design of the filter shape even easier. Triple EQ also offers a dual channel version, with independent left/right, or mid/side equalisation capabilities. Both channels can be linked together in many ways, letting you transform this plugin into a frequency-dependent panner and much more.

The plugin can be controlled in real time with MIDI or automation, and it is capable of absolutely zipper-free clean and continuous time-varying equalisation with no latency. it is the ideal companion of our audio analysis tools for signal-dependent side chain filtering.

This plugin is also available in the Blue Cat bundle, ‘Freeware Plugins Pack ii’. https://www.bluecataudio.com/Products/Bundle_FreewarePack/

TAL Software is a small Swiss company founded in the early 2000s. TAL (Togu Audio Line) creates high quality instruments and effects with user-friendly interfaces, and has reasonable — often free — pricing structures. The vintage synth emulations are accurate and have an authentic feel which has lead to TAL Software being frequently name-dropped in interviews with popular producers and musicians.

The TAL Vocoder is a vintage vocoder emulation with eleven bands that emulates the sound of vocoders from the early 80’s. It includes analogue modelled components in combination with digital algorithms such as the SFFT (Short-Time Fast Fourier Transform). This vocoder includes an envelope follower for every of the eleven bands and does not make a direct convolution of the carrier and modulation signal as other digital vocoders do.

It is optimised for voice processing and includes some algorithms for consonants to make the voice more intelligible. The carrier signal is a VCO with a Pulse, Saw, Noise, and SubOsc, but it’s also possible to use the left stereo input as carrier, which means every sound source can be used as carrier signal. This plug-in supports every sample rate.

Features:

• 11 band vocoder engine
• Internal carrier synth (pulse, saw, sub osc, noise, mono, poly, portamento, sync mode, tune)
• Possibility to route an external carrier signal
• Harmonic control (adds more harmonics to any carrier signal)
• “Ess” enhancer for a clean understandable voice, also with a carrier that hasn’t much high frequencies
• Clip LED, glows if the input signal will be clipped
• Panic button stops hanging notes within the synth
• Documentation shows different routing possiblities
• Low CPU usage
• Side-Chain input

Note: Currently working on stereo channels only.

Geared towards making hard tasks easier, Baby Audio aims to enhance the creativity of anyone with a vision and a laptop through the development of audio plugins. Established in 2019, the company has garnered industry recognition — with its Crystalline plugin being nominated for Sound On Sound’s 2023 SOS Awards, and the Spaced Out plugin winning Future Music’s 2021 ‘Plugin Of The Year’ award. In that short time, Baby Audio has grown its user-base to more than 100,000 passionate music-makers worldwide.

Baby Comeback is a free delay plugin — developed by Baby Audio, in collaboration with Computer Music Magazine — and is a stripped-back version of the award-winning Comeback Kid plugin. Baby Comeback features a built-in ducker to clean up delay repeats when a dry signal is present, and has four different ‘flavour’ modes: Wide, Analog, Saucy, and Cheap.

Features:

• A simple delay that does a lot
• Ducking feature
• Four colour modes ranging from big and wide, to lofi and dirty
• Based on Baby Audio’s Comeback Kid delay

Voxengo was founded by Aleksey Vaneev, and became a full-time commercial endeavour in 2002 after the release of its first successful equaliser plugin, CurveEQ. It has since released over 40 high quality, commercial and freeware sample rate converters and plugins, that have been downloaded by millions of users around the globe. Voxengo offers robust and efficient solutions for audio and music production, including streaming, mastering, and surround sound.

Correlometer is a free analog-style stereo multi-band correlation meter AudioUnit, AAX, and VST plugin for professional music production applications. It is based on correlation meter found in PHA-979 phase-alignment plugin and functions as a multi-band correlation meter with phase issue detection, cross-track phase coherency estimation, and mono-compatibility checker.

Multi-band correlation metering is an advanced way to check for presence of out-of-phase elements in the mix. Broadband correlation metering reports overall phase issues and may misrepresent problems present in select spectral bands, while multi-band correlation meter easily highlights problems present in mid to high frequencies that are not easily heard by ear, but may still reduce clarity of the mix. Another application of multi-band correlation metering is phase- and time-aligning of channels and tracks — especially bass and bass-drum pairs, guitar mic and D.I. source pairs, two-microphone stereo recordings, and so on.

Correlometer can display 4 to 64 individual spectral bands, with adjustable band quality factor that controls the degree of band’s selectivity. Averaging time of correlation estimator can be adjusted. Correlometer supports side-chain inputs for easy correlation estimation between separate audio tracks.

Features:

• 4 to 64 band correlation meter
• Adjustable band quality factor
• Adjustable averaging time
• Side-chain input