Free or cheap plugins

[profplume]

I don't know if this should be in Comp. music but I like to stick to rap becaue that' what I do and those are the results I want. So anyway, on the subject of plug ins:
IDK in the old school it was easy to tell how good a piece of gear was...just look at the price tag, basically. I mean if you had two compressors, one was $100 and one was $1,000, there was really no doubt which one would yield better results, and you would be very hard-pressed to find 'affordable' gear in a professional studio. Then you had your semi-pro mackie stuff and your consumer stuff, which would NEVER be used for any serious project unless it was intentional. You know?

But now, with these VSTs, you may have two professional mastering engineers split between a $10 limiter and a 1000 waves l3. I've seen top people in the industry touting freebies and most importantly, I myself have many plugins that cost a fraction of my waves set but are just better.

I don't know wtf to think. It's easy to explain why a piece of hardward costs ten times as much as another, but plug ins???
Like Crysonic says they are having a blowout sale from $1049 to only $39! WTF??!!

and even though my ear are telling me one thing and I know it's just code, I cant shake the feeling of 'you cant use a free plugin on a commercial product!' lol


I'd like to hear what you think. Give some examples.

For example, the one that made me start this is Quik Quak's upstereo. It's a bad ass FREE spatial enhancer/saturator that I've been throwing on my master bus.

and as far as multi-effects.....there are hundreds of little freeware gems out there. I used to like that Glitch but it got played. Supa trigger is cool.....

[profplume]

Please allow me to add a caveat to that thing about the cool multi-effects because at the same time yesterday I went a little haywire with the freeware crap and my daw didnt like that at all. So, i have since purged much of it. So, I would say to stay 'within reason' ---and not any f----in thing someone drums up on synth-edit. lol

[Boschen]

Rodger Nichols' Inspector
Massey tape saturation plug
Voxengo SPAN

Free and fabulous....
use them on most every track.

[komanderkin]

Variety Of Sound plugins, Togu Audio Line stuff, Martin Eastwood's Mverb, all of those are examples of top quality freeware. any of those plugins could easily go for $50 or more.

i've been selecting the best freeware in different categories for a while, here are some examples:

Free VST Hosts
Free Limiter VST Plugins
Free Parametric EQ VST Plugins
Free Saturation VST Plugins