Voxengo

A very useful multiband compressor. Great on vocals and synths too. Good adjustable GUI. Sound is clean and smooth. Includes an input gate and output clipper, and adjustable saturation on each band. Plus a built in EQ which looks, operates, and sounds like the excellent Gliss EQ in Lite form.

Could benefit from just a bit more complexity. The compression activation function could be adjustable like in the Deft Compressor. It would also be helpful if the compressors could be routed in series while bypassing the frequency crossover.

The only negative feature is the 16ms latency which limits its use while recording.

This is not a delay unit. It is a latency compensation device. You aren't using this to make echoes or chorus. Its a utility mostly useful for time alignment of tracks within a DAW which doesn't have automatic latency compensation, like many 'lite' or free DAWs. For that purpose, it is excellent. All the newbies who are still using cheap DAWs should definitely get this. It is the easiest way to time align all your tracks. There isn't another way to do it which is as reliable and easy as this.

Disregard the low review by folks who thought this was supposed to make echoes. Get Voxengo Tempo Delay for that, which is excellent.

Easy to use, readable graphs, low latency. This tool is well suited when you need to work fast and efficiently. The sound of this plugin is great. Highly recommended.

It's an excellent concept for a plugin and does it well. I always enjoy working with Voxengo's interface.

You think Correlometers are helpful? Yes?

But what if you could have one correlometer per up to 64 frequency bands to determine where phase issues exactly lie in the signal? Wouldn't that be absolutely amazing?

Well, now you have. And it's even for free.

You can scale the monitor however you want (if you only want to see the area from 0 to +1.0 or -1.0 to 0) and as Voxengo plugin, you also can costumize the colors of the GUI to your taste. Plus you can even compare the left or right channel to a sidechain feed.

Another so helpful and free tool from Voxengo, I can't understand why isn't more popular. Isn't that developer awesome?

[Note before: This plugin is listed as "No longer available" but it is in fact still available through the developer's website].

With this plugin you can add short chunks of beeps (either of the same tone or various -> "Variation" parameter), white noise or muted breaks to your audio.


The beeps do what they should, but don't sound very pleasant. White noise comes in and goes out abruptly.

I think the most useful mode of this device is just using muted breaks, of which you can even set the volume of with the "Gain" parameter.

Downsides:

1. The protecting noises only can stay for a maximum of 1,5 second and work dependent upon a regular interval in time. There is no option you can create a long and persisting protector noise.

2. The sound chunks of 1,5 sec come in with no fade-in or fade-out, which can really be annoying to listen to. Especially when you want that your protector sounds are noticable loud. Here a fade-in and fade-out could have build a way easier and pleasant transition.

This plugin belongs to a niche of plugins and is even in the niche a very unique thing. I don't want to disregard it to much, so I still give 4 stars, but I doubt it can be really helpful even for its own purpose.

Usually I'm a fan of Voxengo plugins, it is a great developer, but Tempo Delay does not really convince me. Also it can even be dangerous to damage your ears or hardware (more to that in a second).

But let's start at the beginning.

The basic idea of this delay is equally interesting as also kind of strange. "Tempo Delay", as the name suggest, is focusing on tempo (bpm) as rather note or millisecond values like in traditional delays.

I like if something is going its own path straight against the main stream, but the implementation here is what gives me pain.

1. Setting up the delay times both, the initial delay by "Delay" and the succeding repetitions "Rep Period", requires too many time and brain cells in my opinion. "100%" equals 1/4 at set "4/4" beat.

"25%" = (1/4 * 0,25) = 1/16
"50%" = (1/4 * 0,5) = 1/8
"200%" = (1/4 * 2) = 1/2
"300%" = (1/4 * 3) = 3/4

Now maybe it is just me with being used to traditional delays, but just setting in a "1/8" for a pre-delay and "1/4" for the actual delay works way faster and more uncomplicated.

But what really gives me trouble is the "Feedback" parameter in conjunction with a missing "Clear" button, to clear out the cache.

2. The "Feedback" parameter is set -12 by default. Exceeding the value of around -6 gives you an upward feedback loop, that is, a feedback whose volume increases by every repetition.

As you might can think, this leads to trouble.

Resulting in an extremely clipped signal which, since you have no killswitch, remains persistent as long as you let the plugin in chain. Using the "bypass" button in the topline of every Voxengo plugin does not stop that, only a bypass of the Host gives quick help here.

Indeed, some people might want an upward feedback for sound experiments, but in this ccase the plugin needs a limiter and/or said clear functionality to stop the madness. This, unfortunately, is not provided here.

As a fan of using dail in long Feedbacks, this makes this plugin a pain in the a$$ or better ears for me.

Other negative things:

3. The "Gain" parameters can not be rolled down completely. The Gain for the delays themselves is only reducable by -24, the general "Wet Gain" by -40, and "Dry Gain" by -12 only. What if I want to completely silence a specific signal?

4. Delays only up to a maximum of a 3/4th note. You can't create delays longer than that.

I like the Filter and Tremolo sections as well as the panning dials for each stereo channel but that doesn't really equalize the aforementioned disadvantages of this plugin in my opinion.

You can give it a try nonetheless since it is free, if you are interested in something new, but I recommend using different delays just for the sake of faster achievements and better functionality.

Tube Amp now offers two different modes. The first one is more subtle and refers to a warmy tube saturation. The second mode gives you a more "in your face" distortion sound.

Both modes sound good and can be used for different scenarios.

Other new features are oversampling up to 8X (2x, 4x, 8x) and a soft limiter function for the output signal.

For distortion and saturation effects, I personally prefer a "Wet/Dry Mix"-knob over the implemented "Dry Mix" one, because it gives you better control on how much non-linear distortion it adds to the signal as rather dealing the dry signal back in.

Rolling down the "Drive" and "Bias" parameters individually isn't a great substitute as you can't do this simultaneously which ends up that you change the actual sound instead of getting a clean volume reduction.

As of this reason, I might prefer a different plugin when I need more subtle changes.

But a good free plugin to get.