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The Best Free VST Plugins
Plugins for VST play an essential part in modern computer-based music production
-both as a result of the fantastic variety of different plugins to choose from,
and as a result of the vast number of freeware and donationware VST's available on the Internet:
Today there are more than 5.000 free VST plug-ins (virtual instruments and effects) to choose from,
and more are being added every day!
The free VST plugins and audio production programs on this website are all software of the highest professional standard.
And many of them even rival similar commercial music making programs -both in terms of sound quality and user friendliness.
Our hope is, that you'll find these best free VST plugins useful in your music production!
On BestFreePlugins.com we take the word "free" literally:
You will not find any commercial virtual instruments, effect plugins or audio programs.
And there are no demo versions, trialware, shareware, crippleware, postcardware, or whatever on this site!
We only list the best free plugins that are free in the true meaning of the word:
Freeware and donationware!
Noise emissions at certain time intervals, disabled save function,
or permanent nagscreens will also never find their way to this website.
BestFreePlugins.com support the many freeware VST developers,
who are making top quality virtual instruments and effects for the music making community
-without demanding anything in return.
If you find yourself using any of these free VST's regularly in your music production,
please consider donating a fair amount to the software developers.
It doesn't matter whether they make freeware or donationware,
they have all spent hours upon hours of hard and tedious work making these VST plug-ins available to you for free.
They truly deserve the appreciation!
What is the difference between virtual instruments and VST effects?
VST instruments produce audio. Virtual instruments require notes to be sent via MIDI.
VST effect plugins process audio data (and a few VST effect plugins require MIDI to work).
With a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) or a Software Studio you can then
route (or chain) the audio output from one VST plug-in to the audio input of another VST.
For instance you could send the output of a virtual instrument (eg. a synthesizer) to a VST effect
(eg. a reverb or a delay) for further processing.
This audio data can then be send on to yet some more VST plugins (eg. a compressor or an equalizer)
to be processed even further.
One of the greatest advantages of virtual instruments and effects is that it has become possible to make low cost
software emulations of well-known and very expensive hardware synthesizers and effect units.
Because some of the best free VST software can faithfully emulate both the look and the sonic characteristics
of oldskool original equipment like the DR-808 or Mini Moog.
Free VST plugins now allow music producers to use virtual versions
of musical equipment, that would otherwise be almost imposible to obtain.
![VST Compatible Logo](/screenshots/VST_Compatible_Logo_Steinberg.png)