Free, but definitely not cheap: DDMF’s freeware collection!
Transport
A handy little tool which provides all the information about measure, time, sample count etc that most hosts usually hide somewhere in a tiny little part of the screen. Transport is resizable and you can pick your own colours. Ideally, you’d drag it onto an external monitor in your 1000 square feet wooden studio and make it fullscreen so that your recording artists always stay oriented, but it works in smaller settings as well ;-). Made upon request by a DDMF user, we thought this gem is too good to not make it available for everybody.
TubePreamp
Originally a thesis project by Philipp Bulling, this sophisticated tube preamp emulation has gathered a lot of fans over the last few years.
Endless
Endless is a free reverb plugin that specializes in creating huge, ethereal sound spaces that seemingly extend to infinity. It is your weapon of choice for film music, ambient or larger-than-life sounds. In addition to reverb size controls, Endless also features shimmer and detuning capabilities if you want to make things a little more weird.
IIEQ
The IIEQ is a free, fully parametric 10-band equalizer with its own, characteristic sound and low CPU consumption. The 1st and the 10th band are low and high shelf filters, respectively; all other bands are peak filters. Individual bands can be switched on and off (click on the small green buttons!).
ColourEQ
Not just another EQ: with its custom-made 4th order IIR filter, ColourEQ sounds unlike any other EQ you have ever come across. It comes with five bands of super parametric peaking filters, which means that there is one more parameter in addition to the traditional gain/width/frequency set that can influence the curve shape. These shapes cannot be reproduced by ordinary IIR equalizers. Further features include: adjustable GUI colours, freely resizable window size, internal 64 bit processing and low CPU usage.
All freeware plugins require Windows 7 or higher on PC (32 and 64 bit binaries are available), Mac 10.11 or higher on Mac (with 32 bit binaries up to OSX 10.14, and 64 bit binaries for all OSX versions). Apple Silicon is supported, of course. They come in VST, VST3, Audio Unit and AAX format.