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Free plugins abound on the internet these days, but music-makers are busy people. Many of you don't have the time to keep a watchful eye on the headlines for every complimentary compressor and gratuitous granular synth that's been tossed on the ever-expanding pile of free music software available to the financially savvy producer.

Good news: that's what we're here for. In addition to spotlighting the good stuff in our daily news coverage, we're finishing off each month with a carefully curated round-up of all the free music-making software that's been released over the past 30 days, ensuring you stay up to date with the music production world's most essential freebies.

This March, we've got veritable goldmines from Audio Damage and Toneboosters, AI-powered sample management tools from Waves, another unmissable offering from Spitifire LABS and a screamingly good emulation of the Ibanez Tube Screamer. Dig in.

Platforms: Mac/PC | Formats: VST/AU | Download

Audio Damage surprised music-makers this month by making not just one or two, but 33 of its products available for free download. Weary of providing ongoing support for older software that may not work on newer systems, the manufacturer decided to chuck the whole lot online for free. The upshot is that you now have access to 33 previously paid-for plugins for free, though there may be a bit of trial and error involved to find the ones that will work on your system.

There are some real zingers to choose from, including the Phosphor and Basic synths, the Mangleverb reverb, the Bitcom bitcrusher, the Filterstation filter, the PanStation auto-panner, the Discord 3 pitchshifter, the Automaton buffer effect, the Kombinat multiband distortion and the Axon neural network drum machine.

Platforms: Mac/PC | Formats: VST/AU | Download

Audio Damage appear to have started a trend: following their announcement, Toneboosters also decided to make 23 of their 'retired' plugins available to producers for free. These legacy effects will come without any support or warranty, but thats no reason not to give them a try. They hail from Toneboosters TrackEssentials and BusTools series, and cover everything from dynamics processors to EQs, tape sims, de-essers, reverbs and pitch-shifters.

Platforms: Mac/PC | Formats: Standalone | Download

Waves made waves in the music production world this month with the announcement of a free sample management tool, Cosmos, that comes bundled with 2,500 free royalty-free one-shots and loops.

Cosmos is designed to bring order to your sample collection, putting all the loops and one-shots on your hard drive into one easy-to-search place. Waves says that its Neural Networks technology can analyse, auto-tag and sort your samples, leaving you with a single unified database where you can easily find everything you have. The tool runs as a standalone app, or can be integrated with Waves' CR8 creative sampler plugin.

Platforms: Mac/PC | Formats: VST/AU/AAX | Download

Were big fans of all of Spitfire Audios free LABS instruments, but the new Glass Pianoplugin- a collaboration with composer Philip Glass - looks particularly appealing. Powered by samples that were captured at Glasss home in Manhattan, NYC, and released to mark his 85th birthday, this gives you the sound of his baby grand piano, which has been in the same room since the 1990s.

Glass Piano comes with six presets that cover everything from standard grand piano tones to more atmospheric and warped sounds. The fittingly minimalist interface and control set means that both beginners and more experienced players will be able to get started quickly and easily.

Platforms: Mac/PC | Formats: VST/AU/AAX | Download

In what's certainly the month's strangest free plugin news, car manufacturer Kia announced that they're switching gears, changing lanes and taking a sharp left turn into the world of music-making software.

Launched as part of a marketing campaign and created in collaboration with DaHouse Audio, Kia's free software instrument move.ment is based on the sounds of nature. Its development was driven by science, were assured: The sounds of movement in nature produce whats known as pink noise, says Kia. This increases the alpha waves in the brain, inducing the flow state of consciousness, the state in which the brain is at its most creative.

Beyond the marketing flim-flam, move.ment isn't quite the car crash you might expect. After selecting your nature sound source, you can shape it in the Mixer section, which comes with individual controls for the Sampler, VCO, Noise and Reverb effect. Theres also a filter, an ADSR envelope and an Output section.

Platforms: Mac/PC | Formats: VST/AU/AAX | Download

This one's for the guitarists amongst you - in a delightful mashup of cutting-edge tech and classic gear, GuitarML have used machine learning techniques to recreate the sound of the legendary Ibanez Tube Screamer overdrive pedal in a free plugin. Using sophisticated neural networks, the developer has created a faithful emulation of the Screamer that should reproduce the full spectrum of sonic possibilities presented by all combinations of the Tone, Drive and Level knobs.

Platforms: Mac/PC | Formats: Browser-based | Play

Though it's not technically music 'software', Tahti.studio is a free music-making tool that's so powerful we couldn't bear to exclude it from this list. Released in December last year, the browser-based groovebox received an update this month, with the most exciting addition being an open source library of free-licensed drum samples that features, among others, 808, 909, and household percussion kits fromBedroom Producers Blog.

Inspired by Elektrons hardware grooveboxes, Tahti.studio offers some pretty advanced sample-based sound generation and sequencing possibilities. You have eight tracks to work with, and plenty of flexibility. For example, each track has its own multimode filter, distortion, frequency shifter, sample-rate reducer, and amp envelope. Almost all parameters can be modulated on a per-step basis, and there are three freely assignable modulation sources per track.

Each step can have its own micro-timing, retriggering, probability, and trigger conditions, while tracks can have individual lengths and sequencer speeds. There are four send effects (chorus, phaser, reverb, delay) and a master compressor and soft clipper. Collaboration is possible, too, thanks to the option to export and share patterns in their proprietary file format. You can also render patterns to WAV files so that you can continue to work on them in your DAW.

More:
The best new free music-making software: unmissable freeware synths, drum machines and effects for March 2022 - MusicRadar