Free VST plugins
Every plugin on this page costs nothing and comes from the person who made it. What each one does is taken off its own page; the formats and the system it needs are printed so you know before you download whether it will open in your DAW.
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klattsch
by Crash United (@me_irl)
Retro vocal synthesizer. Supports plain english, japanese kana/romaji, and raw arpabet phoneme codes. Includes piano roll with pitch editor and six built-in voices.
Free
CRUMPETS
by CRQL (@BristowEwan)
Cepstral formant shifter. Control the cepstral cutoff for formant and harmonic information. Shift up/down the mid-information formants.
VST3, CLAP, AU · Free
Loom
by Remo De Vico
Time-stretch texture instrument. Weave controls grain overlap from 1 to 16. Scatter invents phase from 0 to 100 percent.
Free · 62 ratings, 4.9 average
Snake
by Maxime Dangles
Snake generator sequencer. 3 custom sequencers. Choose precise notes to randomize sequencers.
Free · 29 ratings, 5.0 average
Frankenstein
by Remo De Vico
Sample fragment generator. Loads up to 30 samples. Generates waves with 12 to 64 slices.
needs Ableton Live · Free · 13 ratings, 5.0 average
Danaides
by Inear Display
Sequenced sound-mangling effect plugin. Available as VST3 and Audio Unit. Supports macOS Intel or ARM.
VST3, AU · Free · 4 ratings, 5.0 average
TMPLT Sounds
by TMPLT Sounds
Analog-style kick drum synthesizer. Dual-path signal chain with separate click generator. Monophonic and retriggerable behavior.
VST3, AU · Free · 4 ratings, 5.0 average
Two legs, Five arms
by François Pé
Generative drum machine plugin. Six lines: kick, snare, clap, hi-hat, toms, percussion. Continuous style axis blending house, rock, afro-cuban, hip-hop.
AU, VST3 · Free · 4 ratings, 4.5 average
VST3
by Windows-G
Chorus effect plugin. Two LFO shapes: Triangle and Sine. Wet signal high-pass and low-pass filters.
VST3 · Free · 2 ratings, 4.5 average
FREE
by
Audio analysis plugin. 13 analysis lenses including loudness, spectrum, and stereo. Verdict rules engine writes findings with numbers and rule IDs.
VST3, AU · Free
FREE
by
Mid/side effect plugin. Free mid/side plugin. Mid/side processing focus.
VST3, AU · Free
4 physics-inspired plugins
by
Physics-inspired audio effects. Spectral Mass Rebalance uses multiband dynamic tilts. Airy is a point source widener.
VST3, AU, AAX · Free
Questions people ask
Are these really free?
12 of the 12 on this page cost nothing at the time we checked. Free here means a price of zero on the maker's own page, not a trial and not a cut-down edition. Some makers ask for an email address before the download; their page says so, and we do not.
What formats are these in?
Of the 12 listed: VST3 (8), AU (7), CLAP (1), AAX (1). Where a maker does not state a format we leave it blank rather than guess, so an entry with nothing listed is one whose page did not say.
Do any of these need something I might not have?
Some do: Ableton Live. That requirement is printed on the entry itself, because it is the part people find out after downloading. Where a maker ships a wrapper for one host beside a plugin that runs anywhere, the requirement belongs to the version being sold, not to both.
How were these picked?
They came through the same filter as everything we post: a maker's own page, read and stored, with every number checked against it. 7 of the 12 here carry buyer ratings, which are printed. We do not rank things we have not measured, and nothing on this page claims a listening test we did not do.