I’ve just a tips for very logic persons…
Don’t stay in an not logic business 
when optimizations are too slow…don’t stay
edit: Renoise is very powerfull…so stay
I’ll just leave this here:
Minimal Audio Rift is beyond a distortion plugin. You can even tune the frequency of the feedback. For me this was a must buy, especially since the early adopter price is lower.
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There is 1 vst synth/sampler that I bought in the last year or so that I think is totally awesome. It is VST3 only, so for a while I was just using it in Cubase, and dropping samples into Renoise — but now Renoise is VST3!!!
So, if you want to get a monster plugin you should check this out. Especially if you have, “gigabytes, and gigabytes of old drum samples.” Like a lot of us do…
“Elicenser” I know, “it sucks.” Will be a deal breaker for a lot of people… I don’t mind Elicencer. I know it loads slow
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Having tried SO MUCH VSTi out there I find GForce impOSCar one of the most prominent of soft synth…Very MUSICAL synth and very nice analog sound…
FabFilter Twin2 also in that catagory…
BUTT! If I had one to choose from for commercial it would be impOSCar…
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Thats one of my favorite. Nice color!
Tal has updated the ui of noisemaker. Looks much better now
You do know you can subscribe to everything from Kilohearts for just $10 a month? Well worth it imho
I don’t like this method. It’s good for music producers who creates a lot.
Quite the contrary I would say. You can subscribe, and have absolutely everything for more than a year and a half, for the same price as basic Phase Plant. And after one year, you get a voucher for $100 to use on stuff you want to own forever. If that isn’t a nobrainer, what is?
Korg Legacy Collection
I like that it automaps functions to a microkorg.
Haven’t used it as a DAW vsti though, been playing around with it standalone.
Get the $99 NI Komplete Classics bundle before the end of this month! FM8 and Absynth are stellar!
That aside, I highly recommend Messiah, HY-Poly, some of the BLEASS effects, and the SPC plugins (including the almighty ArcSyn) if you don’t want to break the bank! Also, thanks to vouchers on Plugin Alliance, Thorn is the best bang for the buck synth, and BYOME is one of the best multi-fx plugins if you can get it cheap!
I freaking love impOSCar! It has lots of modern-sounding presets including some designed by Rick Smith of Underworld!
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IMPoscar is fantastic! In some of the additional Dave Spiers banks there are also some Underworld sound recreations. Which are great as well! Smith Pad is just bliss. Been playing with imposcar for so long now. I love it. That analogue feeling is more prominent these days. But when IMPoscar (2) first came out it was miles ahead of the other soft synths at the time.
And oh, those Underworld presets never ever inspired me. Whenever I play around with a new synth I never try to recreate them on that machine while looking at imposcar. Cause it is not like I’m a massive Underworld fan, or that they got me into making my own music in the first place. No way. And I’m most certainly not lying in this paragraph. 
I am a fan of U-He synths. Maybe not all, but almost all. I think Zebra can do pretty much any kind of sound, only it is quite complicated to maintain. Often the sweetspot is very narrow, so actual sound design takes a lot of time. Still looking forward for Zebra 3 after all these years… I hope it will improve the usability. Zebra also is very light on cpu, yet sounding awesome.
Then there is Hive 2. It sounds really good, and is an algorithmic wavetable synth, too, very easy to use. If I want a quick, good sounding result, I would choose Hive. It lacks of waveform manipulation like Serum, you would have to write a wavetable algorithm for that. Maybe I should try Serum, but I always was missing a second filter. I know it has combination filters, but still limited here.
Also I should Pigments give a try, looks very inituitive… In short tests, the CPU usage actually was very high, which I don’t like in any of the recent Arturia synths. I think this doesn’t come only from higher quality (I can’t hear a difference to Zebra in quality), but also the lack of optimization skills nowadays. On the other hand I still am using a core i7 from 2013, didn’t apply any spectre-patches to it, so it still is quite fast. Should buy an M1Pro I guess. Every 5-10 years you need a new cpu only to do the exact same work…
Tal-Mod looks very inituitive, too. I recently bought U-He Bazille (not sure why, GAS), it sounds really good. Though designing sounds takes ages for me. Maybe I will sell it again, I try TAL-Mod then.
will be never ported to macos sadly, because of the programming language used and the effort to port this all. Looks to me like the most powerful freeware synth available.
Tranzistow is DONATION ware , not freeware !!
You either donate a minimum of 50 euros ( which is really nothing compared to it’s feature set ) or you create 200 presets .
This is seems to be really fun, finally a very solid FM8 replacement:
I guess you already found out… I am stunned by the quality of the sound… I really like the level of quality Korg delivers here. And they finally focus on digital synthesis again.
Maybe it needs some optimizations, but might be updated in future. Really nice, also makes the hardware devices (preset compatible) much more attractive, at least to me. Let’s see if Modwave native will be released, too!
I rarely spend money on plugins but recently I got these two, could not wait any longer - highly recommended:
FabFilter Pro-Q 3 = Super flexible EQ, nice GUI with fullscreen support, and incredibly easy on the CPU, requires less than native Renoise filters and EQs actually, so you can throw 50x instances of it in a project and hardly notice it. Not a cheap plugin (around €150) but well worth it I think.
Softube Tape = nice Tape simulation, got it on 50% discount, they often have good offers.
One of the reasons I am trying to sell my Komplete 12 Upgrade for Kontakt 6 on KVR and KnobCloud. I managed to get unused registration codes for the Wavestate and Opsix on KVR for $111 and $90, respectively!
DMG Audio plugins don’t get enough love. Simple UIs and top notch DSP. TrackComp 2 is an extremely accurate emulation of the LA-2A, UA 1176, and various other classic compressors for £85. (I hate to sound like a shill, it’s just sad that they never get mentioned in threads like this.)
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I feel attacked by the oppressive machine of psychiatry when faced with this infographic…I can relate to your spending patterns. In harder times I have prioritized having fun with creativity over nutrition. The hunger makes for more detailed work usually but it has it’s end 
Hope you are doing well !
Icarus 2 is a nice-to-use wavetable synth and deserves more love.
The presentation seems a bit trance-genre like, don’t be fooled by that… It seems to me the clearest sounding wavetable synth, the sound is very pristine in the upper frequency range, exciting! Didn’t check aliasing with analyzers, but seems to me (almost) aliasfree. The GUI is straight-forward and easy-to-use. Maybe Vital is even easier to use, but you also can drag-connect automation here.
Though the filters in Icarus are better sounding to my ears and are more useful, and the fx section, too. It might lack - similar to Vital - of a second OSC modulation algorithm (ok, Vital has two, but only very few options then), at least for me. I think you can render the result into a new wavetable and circumvent this limitation then (I actually never so far edited my own wavetable…). Ah yes, it also comes with a full wavetable editor.
Also it uses less CPU than Vital, it is very nicely optimized, feels like assembler code 
Maybe the fastest loading plugin I have and I know so many… The sound really reminds me of (digital) hardware sound. Got it for 99 or so… IMO very worth the money. Then it is now native for M1 and fits nicely into the macos ecosystem, thanks for that @Markus_Krause! Oh, and it also supports MPE! Maybe give it a try.
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