Everyone loves free stuff! Luckily, in the recent years audio producers have been blessed with new free audio software dropping nearly every week. And also the top brands of the industry recognized that giving away some of their favorite plugins for free is a great way of introducing new customers to their work.
We summed up all the free plugin bundles of the big brands for you. With all these bundles you have more than enough instruments, effects and tools to professionally produce, mix and master any song.
1. Komplete Start
Komplete Start is a collection of 7 Kontakt instruments and 7 effects from Native Instruments and iZotope. With Komplete Start you get Analog Dreams, Ethereal Earth, Jacob Collier Audience Choir, Irish Harp, Yangqin as well as as the Kontakt Factory Selection 2 which included Acoustic, Band, Beats, Synth, and Vintage categories, including plenty of drumkits, guitars, synths, keys, and more.
Within the 7 effects you get iZotope's Ozone 11 EQ, Trash Lite and Vinyl. The Ozone 11 EQ can by a great alternative to Eventide's Split EQ, as it allows you to split the signal in to it's transient and sustain material. Trash Lite is a flexible distortion plugin great for adding grit and dirt to your tracks, whereat Vinyl gives you the vintage sound of 6 different decades.
From NI you get the Supercharger compressor, the RAUM reverb, the REPLIKA delay and Guitar Rig 7 LE. RAUM and REPLIKA are amongst the favorite reverb and delay plugins of many industry producers and engineers and shouldn't be missed in your plugin collection!
2. PA Free Music Plugins
The FREE bundle from Plugin Alliance contains 8 really useful plugins for producing, mixing and mastering your music. Alone for the bx_masterdeck Classic its worth it to download the bundle! The masterdeck is a really easy to use mastering solution with a great sound. Don't sleep on this one!
3. Kilohearts Essentials
The Kilohearts essentials bundle contains 33 awesome plugins called snaps. From all the mixing essentials like compressors, limiters, eqs, reverbs etc. to creative effects like a reverser, tape stop or a trance gate. The plugins are lightweight, have a nice flat user interface and sound phenomenal.
If you really want to the make the best out of it, you may consider investing $29 dollars and get kilohearts Snap Heap. Snap Heap let's you host all the kilohearts plugins in sequential or parallel order in one plugin and even allows to modulate nearly every parameters with sequencers, lfos, envelopes and a lot more. If you need multi-band capabilities you can check out Multipass.
4. MFreeFXBundle
The MFreeFXBundle is one of the most comprehensive free plugin bundles available and has a long history. The bundle contains really everything you need for professional production, mixing and mastering. The GUI might be not high polished but you can customize the colors to your liking and Melda's plugins offer a lot of cool utility tools and features. For instance offer all plugins automatic gain compensation, adjustable oversampling from 1x to 1024x, M/S processing, a safety limiter and a lot more.
Some of the highlights are the MAutoPitch, a free Auto-Tune alternative, the MWaveShaper or the MSaturator. You will also find some really useful reverbs in this package!
5. TDR Free Plugins
The small German label Tokyo Dawn Records releases their own audio plugins and specialized audio software for vinyl mastering. With Vladislav Goncharov and Fabien Shivre they have some DSP masterminds in the house, which are responsible for some plugins, that are highly valued by top engineers in the industry.
Next to the paid Gentleman Editions (GE), most of the TDR plugins have a free version available and even the paid ones are not expensive at all and go on sale quite regularly. The TDR Kotelnikov is a really transparent and easy to use mastering compressor and the TDR Nova is a parallel dynamic EQ which is very musical sounding. Recently they released the free spectrum analyzer called Prism, which has an awesome user interface and some really advanced features!
6. Voxengo Free Plugins
Voxengo is the Russian developer Aleksey Vaneev who has created a crazy amount of top notch plugins. While the focus maybe not on the most beautiful interfaces, the amount of control Voxengo plugins are offering is outstanding! Just like the sound of a lot of the plugins.
One of the most famous plugins of Voxengo is the free Span spectrum analyzer. Besides Span Voxengo offers 16 free plugins, from great sounding delays and reverbs to recording utilities, amp sims and an MS encoder.
7. Freeware Plug-ins Pack
The french company Bluecat Audio offer 7 free plugins for you to download including a chorus, a flanger, a phaser, an amp simulator, an eq and gain suite, which let's you manage then gain of multiple channel simultaneously.
8. Baby Audio Freebies
Baby Audio is compared to others on this line up a relatively new company which bring a lot of fresh concepts and new ideas to their plugins. Until now they released every year one stripped down freebie version of one of their most popular plugins. Even if they don't offer a lot of control, they have the same awesome sound like their bigger relatives. With the Baby Audio freebies you get the essentials of their famous Spaced Out, IHNY-2, VHS plugin and Comeback Kid plugins! Creative implementations of chorus, pitchdrift, reverb, delay and compression!