NIH-plug Is A Plugin Framework With Eight FREE Plugins (Including A Disperser Clone)

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NIH-plug is a FREE plugin framework, and you can currently download eight FREE VST plugins to try it out, including a free Disperser emulation.

JUCE has long dominated the audio DSP development realm. Having a readily available framework for development is a fantastic resource for those venturing into making their own plugins. Competition is always good, and NIH-plug brings an open-source framework for developing plugins in RUST.

NIH-plug is platform agnostic and comes with a handful of plugins for producers to use without touching a line of code.

Buffr Glitch is a MIDI-triggered buffer repeater and brings that wonderfully digital glitching sound to your audio. It is a rather clever implementation as well, using the duration of a note to act as a trigger for generating the duration of the glitch effect.

Crisp adds some top end to your basses and is great for bringing out some presence and body to your low-end instruments.

Crossover splits your audio into two to five bands. This is a super basic implementation but does have linear crossover filters. You can essentially process any audio you want as separate outputs, mangling however you wish.

Diopser is a phase rotation plugin inspired by Kilohearts Disperser. It sounds great on kicks or bass. I wouldn’t run this on both at the same time, though.

Loudness War Winner is a “loudener” for lack of a better term. Supremely glad that I have my tracks in Reaper dimmed to -8dB by default before assaulting my eardrums with the sheer volume this pumps out.

Puberty Simulator is an amusing plugin that acts as a pitch shifter that lowers your signal by an octave. It occasionally crackles or goes out of tune. The developer claims this is a joke, but it very well could have some utility in production.

Safety Limiter is the perfect companion to Loudness War Winner. When you have an overage, your DAW signals out an SOS in morse code. Your monitors or headphones get to call for help in a readily recognized international format.

The Spectral Compressor is the real star of the show here and can absolutely smash material. If OTT’s three bands aren’t enough for you, then take full advantage of the FFT bands present in this one.

These plugins are available for all major operating systems, with Windows, Linux, and Mac support. You will need a 64-bit host, and supported plugin formats are VST3 and CLAP. For nightly builds, you can snag them all in one convenient bundle linked below.

More info: NIH-plugDownload Bundle

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Liam is a producer, mixing engineer, and compressor aficionado. When not mixing, he can be found pretending to play guitar, as he has been doing for the last 20 years.

18 Comments

    • alex supertramp

      on

      there’s a max4live device that features real-time processing for time travels.
      when setting the threshold and the sustain level nicely you can even watch how your beard mutates (of course you’ll need a mirror to watch it). and don’t set the mix level too high, otherwise you could easily end up in an 8-bar-loop-blackhole.
      can’t remember the name of the device though. probably did too much time travelling lately.

  1. Unfortunately the ones with a GUI seem to be allergic to Win7. Adieu Crisp, Spectral Compressor and Diopser (various user32.dll missing API, GetDpiForWindow and SetProcessDpiAwarenessContext).
    The GUI-less ones are working fine and quite fun, some good mayhem and destruction. Puberty’s pitchshifting is rather unique and zipper noise free, so you can automate it for a maximum of teh LOLz. Loudness War Winner goes from way too effing loud to tinnitus-inducing larsen. Lovely stuff.
    Would kill (in Minecraft) for Win7 support or GUI-less versions of the others, if too complicated to re-add ancient technologies.

    • Baseview, the underlying windowing library, could be modified to query these functions at runtime and to just not be DPI-aware on Windows 7, but since Windows 7 (or 8, and 8.1) are EOL I don’t think this will make its way into baseview.

  2. Diopser and Spectral Compressor still working fine, the rest of the bundle won´t loading under Win10 with Reason12.5.1
    really nice plujgings thumps up

  3. Only tried the disperser so far but very impressed. Only one niggle I could find that the developer might want to know about. When I have the plugin window open in Reason 12 it disables the keyboard shortcuts for a number of functions including transport controls.

  4. Diopser and Spectral Compressor working fine under Win 20H21 DAW Reason 12, but all other plugins are not loading.
    Big thanks to Robbert van der HELM, amazing new plugins you have give us at this poin!
    3 thumps UP

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