Autor: Producer Gang

Stemwire has released Zero Sweep Filter and Subkeeper Saturator, two freeware effects for macOS and Windows. I love the minimal design of these plugins. White on black looks clean, and I think it fits the general idea behind these plugins because they both address a specific production problem without adding a bunch of controls you won’t need. Zero Sweep Filter handles the familiar transition effect of sweeping a high-pass or low-pass filter. Making the sweep is the easy part, but returning to a completely clean signal often means automating the bypass or adding a wet/dry move alongside the filter. Stemwire…

Venus Theory has released forms:steel Free Edition, a free handpan library for Decent Sampler. We have covered a lot of Venus Theory freebies on BPB, including forms:tongues, forms:piano, and several Auras instruments. If you enjoyed those, this one is a super easy recommendation. forms:steel has the same layout and quality I expect from Venus Theory’s free Decent Sampler releases. It is very playable, great for cinematic work and game audio, and it has some really fun sounds if you are looking for quick inspiration without having to manage a huge library. The source instrument is a hang drum, which I…

dBdone has released Feuer, a free creative drum-processing plugin for macOS and Windows that’s a lot more fun than I anticipated. We recently covered dBdone Glas, a free spectral chaos plugin for turning pads, synths, and vocals into glassy textures. Feuer is somewhat similar, but aimed at drums, percussion, breaks, and rhythmic loops. Anyway, based on the looks, I was expecting Feuer to be the usual saturation or clipper-type plugin. However, this is anything but a normal saturator, and I would not treat it like a general mix bus effect, either. I tried it on a full mix first, expecting…

Minimal Audio has released Lucid, a new real-time granular effect plugin for macOS and Windows. We have covered Minimal Audio several times on BPB, including Current, Rift, and Morph EQ. Lucid fits the same general pattern we’re used to from Minimal Audio. It looks sleek, works great for sound design, and makes a complex process feel more playable and musician-friendly. Granular effects are great when you want huge pads, frozen textures, reverse swells, and weird rhythmic fragments, but they can also become hard to control. The main idea behind Lucid is to keep the results musical even when the processing…

ZEKAVEO is offering two free Quantum UI & Computers Discovery Edition sample packs, plus an exclusive 70% discount for BPB readers on eligible paid libraries. There’s a lot to cover here, so I’ll start with the freebies and then tell you more about the BPB discount. ZEKAVEO’s Quantum UI & Computers is a series of SFX packs for futuristic interfaces, computer systems, data processing, glitches, alerts, sci-fi tech, and related sound design. The first free pack, Quantum UI & Computers – Discovery Edition (UCS), includes 17 files and 21 sounds in WAV format. It combines 5 construction kit sounds and…

Solo developer Thales Pereira has released StemDeck, a free and open-source stem separation tool for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Thales says he built StemDeck to help his kid practice drums, after wanting a way to pull stems without paying a subscription or uploading music to someone else’s server. We’ve covered a few stem tools over the years, including Ultimate Vocal Remover and Go-Splitter, but StemDeck is unusually straightforward compared to most other similar tools. It is free, local, open source, and does not require an account, quota, upload, or subscription. StemDeck uses the open-source Demucs htdemucs_6s model to separate songs…

HARMONICO dsp has released Airy, a free stereo widening plugin for macOS and Windows. Airy was developed by Nicolas Barreau, a sound engineer and acoustician based in Paris. He reached out via email and described the plugin as a “point source widener,” inspired by the Airy diffraction pattern, in which a single point of light passing through a lens becomes a bright core with faint surrounding haloes. That sounds a bit abstract and took me a minute to figure out what the plugin is about, but the idea is actually simple enough. Airy measures the width your signal already has…

A great kick is not one sound, it is three parts working together: the click, the punch, and the tail. This breakdown builds a kick from scratch in Serum 2, shaping each part with the oscillator, the pitch envelope, and the amp envelope. The Anatomy of a Kick Click, punch, tail. The amp envelope controls the amplitude and shapes the overall sound, while the pitch envelope modulates the oscillator’s pitch and creates the punch. Key settings: Click: the very start, the high-frequency attack Punch: the pitch dropping fast, driven by the pitch envelope Tail: the sustained low-frequency body, shaped by…

FrozenPlain has released Floe 2.0, a major update to its free and open-source sample library player for Windows, macOS, and Linux. We covered Floe in beta last year, when it was already looking like a more modern successor to FrozenPlain’s older Mirage engine. Version 2.0 feels like a big update, and it’s worth checking out if you are interested in the free sounds available for the platform. The important thing to clarify is that Floe is the player, not a giant bundled library. It runs FrozenPlain’s paid Floe-format libraries, but the free side currently consists of Music Box Suite Free…

Beatport has expanded its partnership with Beatdapp to detect and block AI-generated music before it reaches the online store. The policy itself is not new, as Beatport announced its stance on AI-generated music in January 2025, but the important change lies in how it’s enforced. Under the updated content guidelines, tracks identified as fully or majority AI-generated will be withheld during ingestion, and rightsholders will be notified directly. Music made with AI assistance can still be accepted, as long as the finished track remains mostly human-made. Beatport says those releases will be tagged during ingestion, giving its curation team a…