This week’s free plugin is Bitter Sweet from Flux. An old plugin which we were pleasantly surprised is bang up to date in terms of compatibility and still sounds great.

What Is Bitter Sweet?

Bitter Sweet is a transient designer, it’s been around a really long time. Look online and you’ll find a Pro Tools Expert video from 2013 demonstrating this plugin! It’s been around so long I must admit I’d kind of forgotten about it but installing it on my M2 Macbook Pro I find it’s up to date with Apple Silicon support and unusually, particularly for a free plugins, it is AAX DSP.

This plugin is simple to use, turn the control to ‘Sweet’ to soften transients, turn to ‘bitter’ to accentuate transients. There are a few other things to be aware of. The Period control affects the time window used to detect transients, the Fast, Med and Slow controls affect the processing based on this Period. Link is a useful gain matching control to make up for increases and decreases in apparent level post-processing and the Mode control introduces MS processing.

It’s great to be reminded of a plugin which still stands up today and it was great to see it will work as well on my M2 mac with my Carbon as it did on my Intel Mac in 2013!

How Do I Get Bitter Sweet?

Click the button above to go the the Flux Website, Download FluxCenter, Log into your account or set up an free account. Download Bitter Sweet.

Bitter Sweet is available for windows and macOS as a VST, AU and AAX plugin, Apple Silicon compatible, no iLok required.