Best free plugins and freeware of the month: December 2023

You don’t need to spend the earth on expensive plug-ins when you can get amazing tools for free.

• READ MORE: Best sample packs of the month

We’ve rounded up another stack of high-quality freeware releases for you to check out and use in your productions, including a beautiful-sounding vintage pre-amp, a powerful EQ with transient and sustain processing, a string synth emulation, a suite of useful plugin tools, and even a full DAW from Universal Audio.

Universal Audio – Luna

Standalone DAW for macOS

Universal Audio’s Luna DAW was previously only available for those with UAD hardware, but is now free for macOS users. It’s a fully-featured piece of recording software with extensive editing and a console-like workflow, plus a built-in Oxide Tape saturation extension, a Shape Toolkit instrument, and an ARP arpeggiator.

You’ll be able to use your own third-party plugins in Luna, but to truly get the most out of it, you might want to upgrade to the Pro Bundle (currently on sale for $199 instead of $399), which has a whole bunch of high-quality UAD processors such as the API channel strip, Pultec EQ, LA-2A compressor and more.

Download at: https://www.uaudio.com/luna.html

Fuse Audio Labs – VPRE-72

VST, VST3, AU, AAX for macOS and Windows

The V72 is a classic preamp from the early 50s that has been heard on countless records over the years. Fuse Audio Labs has just released VPRE-72, which emulates the input and output transformers, the dual EF804s pentode circuit and the heavy output choke of this beautiful sounding piece of hardware. You simply drive your signal into the tube circuit to get a subtle lift, or go harder for some musical sounding saturation. There are also low and high cut filters, and grouping feature.

Download at: https://fuseaudiolabs.com/#/pages/product?id=301060823

Venn Audio – Free Suite

VST3, AU, AAX for macOS and Windows

What’s better than one free plugin? A whole suite of ‘em! Venn Audio has released this useful bundle of effects and tools to help you get the best out of your mix. It includes a compressor, clipper with oversampling, convolver, EQ, tone generator, delay, and gain, pan and metering utility tools.

The Convolver is especially interesting, as it lets you select any portion of the IR waveform to process your audio. So you could use a shorter and quieter part of an impulse response tail, and then use the Auto Normalise function to bring up the volume.

Download at: https://www.vennaudio.com/free-suite-our-free-plugin-bundle-has-been-released/

Full Bucket Music – Oxid

VST, VST3, AU, CLAP for macOS and Windows

Full Bucket Music expands its already sizable collection of freeware synths with Oxid; a warm sounding emulation of the ARP Omni-2 String Synthesizer from the 1970s.

It closely follows the original hardware, with String and Synthesizer sections, and also adds built-in Phaser and Delay Effects, 64 voice polyphony, paraphonic mode, a resizable interface and MIDI learn for all parameters. It is written in C++ code so you can expect high performance and a low CPU hit.

Download at: https://www.fullbucket.de/music/oxid.html

iZotope – Ozone 11 EQ

iZotope has decided to give away the EQ module from Ozone 11 as a standalone plug-in. It has a beautiful resizable GUI, flexible filter shapes, Analog and Digital modes with adjustable linear phase per band, auto Gain Match, and hi-res metering.

What really sets it apart though, is the new Transient and Sustain processing modes. Alongside the L/R and M/S modes, you can sculpt the transient and sustain portions of your signal separately, so you could tame a bass pluck whilst leaving the tail intact, or reign in a nasty kick drum knock. It’s available separately or as part of NI’s free Komplete Start instruments and effects bundle.

Download at: https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/izotope/ozone-11-eq/