Audio Damage has turned its characterful Grind wavetable distortion FX into a free plugin for macOS, Windows, and iOS.
Plugins come and go. If plugins are no longer maintained by the developer or a new version is in the pipeline, these often disappear from the screen. A while ago, Audio Damage showed how this could be done very nicely with its legacy plugins. Instead of sending them to oblivion, the developers have made the plugins available as free downloads.
This legacy list has now been expanded to include another plugin. Audio Damage has announced the discontinuation of its unique Grind wavetable distortion fx processor plugin. All three, the macOS, Windows, and iOS, are now free of charge.
Audio Damage Grind
Grind is now a legacy plugin. This means that all three versions (macOS, Windows, and iOS) will no longer receive updates from the developers. It’s worth downloading the plugin as it’s a characterful distortion with many options. It is capable of generating timbres from subtle tube-style saturation to full-on mangled wavetable distortion, a Swiss army knife of distortions.
Grind consists of three main blocks: wavetable lookup, algorithmic saturation/distortion, and a multi-mode filter.
The wavetable module uses the amplitude of the incoming signal to replace the sample with one from 15 different linearly-interpolated wavetables, chosen for their mangling potential. Window size and phase controls provide further tone-shaping possibilities.
Then, the signal goes into the algorithm module, with eleven different distortion and saturation algorithms, from simple soft-knee saturation on up to full-on sine warping. From here, it passes through a multi-mode filter stage, with eleven different filter models, including “vintage digital” versions from the early days of plugin development, on up to our modern analog-modeled MS20-style lowpass and highpass synth filters.
A tempo-synced LFO provides motion for the filter frequency, and a final stage of soft clipping and DC filtering tames the output.
Don’t forget the iOS version is also free of charge, so you can explore Grind also on your iPhone and iPad in your favorite AUv3-enabled mobile DAW or AU host.
There is a bug Audio Damage says:
Due to a small bug in some legacy code that can’t be worked around, the filter type was recalling incorrectly when sessions were reloaded. We tried several approaches to fix this, but ultimately, had to work around it.
So, if you load a session that was created with Grind v1.0.x, the filter type will be set to 4PLP until you resave it with the new Grind. Apologies for this, but there was no other way that didn’t really mess up existing saves.
Grind v2 In The Pipeline?
Audio Damage says no. Some of Grind’s unique features will be packed in a future Kombinat update.
Thanks Audio Damage for this free plugin.
Audio Damage Grind is available now as a free download from the Legacy page. It runs as a VST, VST3, AU, and AAX plugin on macOS (Intel + native Apple Silicon) and Windows. The iOS version is available for free from the Apple AppStore.
More information here: Audio Damage
I would much rather see developers continue supporting their existing plugins than turn them into free “legacy” titles, or at least make their abandonware open source so the user community can take care of updates. All this does is create some nice publicity until the plugins that customers have paid for will stop working when the next big OS update is due.
Not on windows 😁