With so many excellent free plugins out there, what are the reasons, if any, to go out and buy the software tools we need? We look at the reasons to spend or not to spend…

Being able to create, produce, and mix music in the digital age as easy as opening your laptop, but the process can also be entirely free. This is fantastic news for new creators with near zero budget who are trying to get heard in a crowded landscape.

False Economies

Most of us know what it’s like to work with a limited budget to buy our own gear and software; the hope is that as our careers grow, so does our ability to get our hands on the next shiny new thing that promises to make our work even better. While it’s true that every now and then we buy something that does make a tangible improvement to our music, it’s possible that some people reading this will also have experienced the dreaded ‘buyer’s remorse’, where the new thing quickly turns into a dusty, unused thing.

Often the most significant changes in any mix (ie, the ones that make the listener’s experience a better one) happen in the first minutes of working on it. As we chip away, the changes can become increasingly less significant in the familiar ‘diminishing returns’ scenario. If this is the case, could it be that the plethora of free tools available have afforded us everything we could ever need all along?

MFreeFXBundle

Some developers go to great lengths to give us high quality tools that can be used on a budget of zero. Based in Prague, Czech Republic, MeldaProduction boldly describe their plugins as “with absolutely no doubt, the most powerful and versatile tools on the market.” To prove their faith in this, their MFreeFXBundle gives you no fewer than 37 free tools that leave absolutely no stone unturned in getting your mix ready for the world.

For an incredibly modest £42, you can upgrade to get the following features added on:

• You can change size and style of the plugins.

• You can access the sonogram feature in the analyzers and equalizers.

• You can manipulate (save, load, organise) your own presets.

• You can access the modulators.

• Most plugins can perform upsampling which minimizes aliasing, therefore it is useful to improve the quality of processing.

• The plugins will not display the big red reminder box with their clickable logo at the bottom of every GUI.

Going The Extra Mile

We can start to look at the details once those initial broad-brush mix decisions are made. In the case of the MFreeFXBundle, we are free to get the lion’s share of processing power for nothing, with the upgrade buying us features such as preset management that ultimately save us time and money anyway. The company adds that upgrading “will make us happy and help us develop more free software ;-)”. Who could argue with that?

Free plugins are good, but paid ones allow us to work to the absolute fullest of our own potential, while allowing young developers to get noticed and continue to thrive.