As is now tradition, we polled our Facebook deals and freebies group members throughout December to decide which 2022 free plugins deserve to be on this year’s top 10 list.
Since about the same time last year, our group has expanded by no less than 19,000 members. This means our latest poll reached up to 69,000 members! And of course, the results poured in like the high tides in Hawaii, once again pulling the most qualified free plugins straight into the spotlights by consensus of our community.
The plugins presented in the poll were all newly released or made available for free in 2022 and permanently free, meaning they are yours to use forever without paying. For reference, the actual poll can be viewed and discussed here, while here below we present the awesome list of 10 best FREE 2022 plugins as voted for by our members.
- Spitfire Audio LABS – new instruments
- Kilohearts Essentials
- Analog Obsession – new plugins/updates
- Krotos Studio Free
- Full Bucket PolyEnsemble
- Black Rooster Ro-Gold
- Codec from Lese
- Caelum Audio Flux 2 Mini
- ML Soundlab Amped Roots v2
- Orchestral Tools SINEfactory
Just like last year, Spitfire steal the show with extreme ease, grabbing 41% of all votes, leaving runner-ups to eat dust and grab at straws for dear life. And we do understand why. LABS Instruments have been spreading freely like wildfire since their inception some years ago.
There have been a few new LABS Instruments released in 2022, like Gealic Voices, Electronic Antique, Vintage Drums and Foghorn. But at the time of the poll in December, the latest release was Cassette Synth, offering sounds from a 1980s Yamaha CS-80 played through a one-of-a-kind selection of emulated cassette players. Expect quirkiness, uncertainty and instability in pads made to bring out depth in your music while speaking to the heart of modern music-production.
At the time of this writing though, Bell Swarm joined the list of LABS releases, an assortment of vibraphones, glockenspiels and hand bells recorded in a real medieval church, resulting in a wide range of unusual single hits as well as a bunch of uniquely layered sounds that bounce of the walls like a tennis-ball on court.
As part of the Spitfire Audio LABS collection, these releases are always fantastic quality, and always totally free.
Not just one plugin but a range of plugins, once paid but now completely free. Kilohearts live up to their name by turning their pack of essential effect plugins loose into the wild, to be used by anyone without cost. Since these became free in 2022, they applied in the poll and swiftly took second place in the list with 22% of all votes. Together with Spitfire LABS, almost two-thirds of all votes are already consumed, showing the fierce popularity in 2022 for these two developers.
The Kilohearts Essentials collection currently comprises 32 top-notch plugins and Kilohearts is committed to continuously adding new releases to the heap, making it a growing collection of freebies. Whenever a new release is added, it is automatically added to your account.
Currently, the bundle includes; 3-band EQ, Bitcrush, Channel Mixer, Chorus, Comb Filter, Compressor, Delay, Distortion, Dual Delay, Dynamics, Ensemble, Filter, Flanger, Formant Filter, Frequency Shifter, Gain, Gate, Haas, Ladder Filter, Limiter, Nonlinear Filter, Phase Distortion, Phaser, Pitch Shifter, Resonator, Reverb, Reverser, Ring Mod, Stereo, Tape Stop, Trance Gate and Transient Shaper.
With these in your DAW, you would technically have no essential need for any other plugin, but beyond these essentials, we still urge you to continue reading the rest of our top 10 list.
3. New releases and updates by Analog Obsession
Again not just one plugin but a range of them released in 2022, Analog Obsession takes third place with 9% of the remaining votes, a respectful result that shows a popular demand behind the Analog Obsession brand.
Available exclusively on Patreon, the developer behind Analog Obsession, Ridvan Küçük, gives out all his plugins for free, and he is so good at what he does that his brand echoes through the plugin-realm like a never-ending reverb, always in the background but always there to those that notice. Analog Obsession is the definition of an underdog in the plugin-realm, offering so much more than meets the eye and reaching out into the community unexpectedly, surprising us with innovation time and time again. No wonder his 2022 releases take third place after Spitfire and Kilohearts.
Among the plugins released in 2022, we find for instance Comper, FrankCS, RareSE, Trax, BlackVibe among others. His plugins can be used by anyone who wants to, but Analog Obsession is a one-man show and supported by the Patreon initiative, he needs our support to continue doing what he does, namely providing unique quality plugins for free. For just a few dollars each month, you can help him to keep developing new products, so when downloading his products, also consider the Patreon information at the top of the webpage.
At 4th place, Krotos Studio Free is a genuine sound effect station to ‘create Hollywood sounds in seconds’. As the concept of free plugins for creating film sound effects is rare, this really seems like a logical 4th place.
Its concept is simple: just select a category and preset, shape the selected sound by means of mouse and MIDI controller, and then drag your creation to your timeline or folder to use it. The results are fabulous: gents like Nikola Jeremic, Tony Gibson and James David Redding seem to love it, calling it a “Swiss Army knife for sound” and “an invaluable tool”.
For anyone interested in designing any kind of sound effects, Krotos Studio became the 2022 way to go and continues to be very promising throughout 2023, of course with a free entry ticket for everyone. And as the project continues, they have promised to add more pro-level controls and advanced editing functionality, sooner rather than later. Good stuff!
Another underdog of plugin awesomeness is Full Bucket Music, rather famous in the plugin world for its wide range of vintage hardware synth emulations. Its recent release of PolyEnsemble has made it onto the 2022 best free plugins list, taking 5th place.
PolyEnsemble is an emulation of the Korg PE-2000 Poly-Ensemble S string machine from 1976. As far as vintage goes, the developer of PolyEnsemble offers buckets of it, oozing with the taste of hardware from our music’s past. High performance and low CPU consumption at no cost are Full Bucket’s trade mark, and PolyEnsemble combines it with a truly vintage vibe, a wide range of tweakable instrument parameters, a resizable GUI, MIDI learn functionality, faithful recreation of 8 original presets, and support for both Windows and MacOS in 32 and 64 bit.
6. Ro-Gold by Black Rooster
Another plugin brand that has grown to be very well known in the vast and stretched-out plugin-fields, Black Rooster Audio clucks its way from release to release, establishing the innovation and quality behind the brand. Their 2022 free plugin, Ro-Gold, takes a well-deserved 6th place.
Ro-Gold emulates what is called a Gold-Plate Reverb, capturing the true tonality of a solid gold plate reverb, capable of proverbially turning any sound signal into 24-karat hocus-pocus. In the music business known as the most luxurious and exclusive room effect, its vintage taste is blended with modern technology to offer the best of both worlds in a neat package made to be plug-and-play in any DAW or plugin-host.
Black Rooster Audio offers many paid plugins but this one is gracefully placed among its range of freebies, just to have the most inaccessible reverb effect in the world accessible to anyone in the world. We love how the Black Rooster’s heart and mind operates…
SINEfactory takes 7th place with a free subscription service offering access to a heap of exclusive free instruments, delivered to you by electronic mail in a steady stream, straight into your virtual mailbox.
To get this, just create an account, then hit the “Sign Up for FREE” button and download the SINE Player, run it and load your instruments of choice. Among the range of instruments, you can find strings, pianos, percussion, horns, guitars, organs and much more. The team at Orchestral Tools say there really is no catch, subscribe for free and that’s it.
Even if you unsubscribe for reasons unknown, you get to keep all downloaded instruments but logically won’t receive any more future SINEfactory releases. Even for those firmly against the subscription model in general, this is hard to ignore or pass by as far as to give it a try. Few have actually regretted it and a 7th place in this year’s top ten free plugin list seems well-deserved.
8. Codec by Lese
“Codec is for sound destruction”. This statement from the developer perfectly describes the nature of Codec, but it does it in a truly unique way…
Modern degradation of sound is what this unusual plugin provides, though in a way that sets it apart from all other plugins that simulate the typical old-school sound degradation like vinyl, tape and cassette. This plugin actually uses internet compression algorithms to compress and decompress your sounds in real-time inside your DAW. It is actually a container holding an audio-file compressor that would be used to reduce the file size of your audio, much like you might use winzip to compress your files.
The developer lists a few examples of its surprising capabilities, like simulating a poor internet connection or adding crunch and other artefacts to your sounds in a controlled manner.
This plugin takes 9th place but in terms of usability and range of application, it would stand taller than most because it is one of those multi-multi-use tools that you’re prone to use on nearly every track and sound in various different ways.
Flux Mini 2 offers one simple but very powerful thing, curve automation, in the form of an easy-to-use, multi-purpose plugin in which you can draw bezier curves that can be used to automate any parameter for cutoff, resonance, amp and mix. Tonal adjustments can be made with LPF, HPF and BPF, and automation can be controlled by MIDI triggering, as well as MIDI-CC to control other plugins. But despite its limited parameters and basic function, there are no limits to how and where it can be applied to modulate a sound. From modulating to ducking sound, sidechain-like action and creating rhythmic effects, multiple parameters can be controlled simultaneously to create either musical chaos or the exact opposite.
ML Soundlab has been around for a while, but they have only recently released Amped Roots v2 as their very first Amp emulation plugin, and while its fully licensed version comes paid, there is a free version too.
This version comes with one amp called 5034 Fluff and there are three more to be had for those interested in the full license version. It simulates a 3D cabinet environment to mix and match cabinets, adjust tone, move or angle mics and load in your own IRs. It also includes a pedalboard with studio-quality effects like Noise, Gate, Compressor, Drive, Pedal, Chorus, Analog Delay and Reverb. The developer boasts a reliable tuner, MIDI capability and extreme versatility on top, basically stating it is a quality product.
This concludes our top ten free plugins list which is pretty awesome again this year. To end on the highest note we would like to thank the members who decided to engage in the poll and place there votes. But of course, our gratitude extends to all our 69,000 members for their ongoing commitment, who we have truly grown to consider as no less than family through the years. Without YOU guys and girls, men and women, producers and pluginheads, our group wouldn’t be the awesome community that it is.
For the next big best-of-free plugins list you will have to wait until next year. Though we shall be reviewing more freebies and pricing more specific best-ofs throughout 2023. Until then, may music fill your soul and spirit on a daily basis, preferably made with plugins from this list.
