Unusable Engineering has released Cavitation Fractures, a free distortion plugin for macOS inspired by fluid dynamics.
I love distortions in general, and I especially enjoy trying new ones that don’t follow the standard overdrive/clipping playbook. Cavitation Fractures is one of those.
It’s different but not weird in a way that you don’t know how to use it when you load it for the first time. It’s pretty intuitive when you start twisting the knobs and listening to the results.
I’ve been using it for distorting basses in particular over the past couple of days, and I think it’s exceptional for that. It’s already in regular rotation for my next cinematic SFX project on Flame Sound.
The concept is inspired by fluid dynamics rather than traditional waveshaping. Instead of running your signal through a static clipping curve, the engine spawns fracture events from transients and routes them through nonlinear shaping.
So what you get on the output moves and breaks up with the input rather than just squashing on top of it. It’s a bit hard to describe, but cool when you put it into practice.
The developer’s description of the sound is better: Most of the time, it sounds like putting your signal through the wires on a snare drum. That’s a useful way of thinking about what it does: it sounds rattly and broken up.
The main controls are Rupture, Mass, and Friction, which together shape how often fracture events occur, how heavy they feel, and how they move over time. There are also Snarl and Velvet parameters for adjusting the character, plus the usual Mix and output controls so you can pull extreme settings back into something usable.
In my experience, it works great on bass lines to add edge without losing weight, and as a sound-design tool for transitions and impact textures. It can also handle vocals if you want a more damaged feel than your average distortion plugin.
Again, from my own testing, basses are where it really shines, but I’d encourage trying it on anything dynamic.
It’s worth noting that this is not a transparent analog-style saturator, and it won’t sit politely on a mix bus. It’s a creative distortion, and a slightly chaotic one at that. So don’t expect subtle results.
The one big caveat is that Cavitation Fractures is macOS only. AU and VST3, macOS 10.15 or higher. Windows users are out of luck for now.
To grab it, add it to your cart on the Unusable Engineering site and check out at €0.
Download: Cavitation Fractures (FREE)
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Last Updated on May 12, 2026 by Tomislav Zlatic.
