Indie developer cloph-dsp has released Freeze95, a free zero-latency stutter and freeze effect with a Windows 95-era CRT interface.
Freeze95 is a three-band glitch engine designed to add motion to static audio. The signal is split with a phase-coherent LR4 crossover, and each band is then independently glitched using randomized capture, reverse, slow-mo, and granular algorithms.
The aesthetic and the name both come from 90s personal computer nostalgia. Developer Pedro Castro told me he built the plugin around memories of his childhood computer freezing mid-song, with the stuck audio buffer producing that harsh rapid-fire stutter.
If you’ve ever used an early Windows PC, you’ll probably recognize the sound (though some would say you’ll hear it even more on more recent versions of Windows 😈).
For me personally, anything Windows 95-inspired brings back memories, since I grew up with one of those old grey desktop PCs as my main computer. Those are some very warm memories, so a plugin built around that aesthetic is always my cup of tea.
There are only a few main controls. Chaos (0–100) scales stutter intensity through four named zones (Tame, Shift, Fracture, and Melt). Lo-Fi (0–100) handles a band-aware lo-fi chain that combines dynamic bit reduction (6 to 16 bits), sample-rate decimation, companding, and a tilt EQ, again with four zones (Clean, Warm, Grain, Crush).
Tempo can host-sync to your DAW or free-run anywhere from 20 to 300 BPM, and the Power switch acts as a true hard bypass for instant signal recovery.
Under the hood, there’s some clever stuff going on to keep things from sounding too mechanical. The reverse and granular modes use probabilistic gap injection and a “walk” system layered on the host sync for subtle randomness, so back-to-back stutters don’t lock into a perfectly repeating grid.
The engine is transient-aware, biasing captures toward low-energy regions to reduce clicks, and uses spectral panning for stereo width.
I also loved that the parameters are optimized for automation, with smooth gliding to avoid zipper noise, so you can sweep Chaos or Lo-Fi aggressively without artifacts.
Freeze95 was built with Faust and iPlug2. The macOS build is marked as Beta because the developer doesn’t own a Mac for extensive local testing. Worth knowing in case you run into anything on macOS.
Freeze95 is available in VST3 and CLAP formats for Windows 10/11 (64-bit) and macOS (Beta). There’s no installer or DRM. You drop the file into your VST3 or CLAP folder and rescan.
It’s a pay-what-you-want download on Gumroad, and you can grab it for free by entering $0 at checkout.
Download: Freeze95 (FREE / Pay What You Want)
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Last Updated on May 10, 2026 by Tomislav Zlatic.
