The Best Free Audio Tools

Easy VST Host

VSTHost by Hermann Seib is a free VST host. Perfect if you are new to VST's and just want to try them out and see what they can do, or for live performances where ease of use and stability is an issue. VSTHost is very easy to setup, and the manual is incredibly comprehensive. Just start the program and press Ctrl-N to load a VST plugin, and off you go! You can play the VST instruments with your MIDI keyboard, your normal pc-keyboard or your mouse.You can run multiple plugins (instruments and effects) at the same time, load and save VST presets, record what you play to wav-files (8/ 16/ 24 and 32-bit supported), load MIDI files, import and export SysEx, and save all settings and setups in a bank and load them up easily.

Easy VST Host

ASIO4ALL is a free hardware independent and universal low latency ASIO driver. If your soundcard either doesn't support ASIO, or the on-board ASIO-driver has a high latency, this is the solution for you. A low latency driver is a must-have, if you're serious about making music!

Portable recorder

Streamosaur is a piece of audio production software for recording audio streams -directly to disk in Wav or MP3 format. It can record from sound card inputs: microphone, input lines from an external mixer, audio tape and more, as well as audio streams from the Internet. Streamosaur doesn't write in the registry, making it completely portable. Just unzip the file anywhere you want it to do the recording (e.g. on your MP3-player, harddisk, USB-key, or cd-rom) and launch the exe file.