TBProAudio - GSat+ (Saturation Plugin) Win & Mac - 64 Bit - Free

GSat+ is derived from the saturation module on the TBProAudio CS5501V2 channel strip plug-in, but adds extra features requested and suggested by the Gearspace.com team. It has several different saturation modes, high tweakability, oversampling, old-school VU meters and cross-platform software compatibility - as well as a button to take you directly to Gearspace.com in case you need any tips, tricks or inspiration or want to swap presets with other users

Features:

• Saturation with three different "tube-based" character modes.
• Clip protection.
• VU meters.
• Signal monitoring.
• Over sampling.
• Plug-in bypass.
• Preset management.
• Large and easy to use freely-scalable GUI.
• 64-bit internal processing.
• Very efficient CPU usage design.
• Free.

Code:

https://www.tbproaudio.de/products/gsatplus

 

Last edited: Jul 16, 2021

It looks like one of those plugins you could use on many channels, or even better buses. A special and nice feature is the choice of how much odd and even harmonics you want applied. Lovely feature, and they didn't forget oversampling, too! All whilst you can watch your VU RMS levels and have input and output control; a minor digression here - I'd make them the same size as other knobs, or even better - change into vertical faders. Otherwise it's pretty perfect.

Thank you so much TBProAudio!

 

https://www.tbproaudio.de/products/dpmeter
this one also got updated

 

IIRC, not really. When you turn it up, the harmonics are not slowly risen in level (so from -infinite upwards) but suddenly jump to a pretty high level. Only from there it works.

 

it's a bit strange that there has to be an installer for it. also the knobs are frozen for one minute on starting the plugin on windows 7, vsthost, in both 64 bit .dll and .vst3. there seems to be something happening under the hood that isn't related to dsp. installer seemed to need higher than normal permissions. a plugin like this should be drag and drop into a vst folder.

 

Last edited: Jul 16, 2021

Oh @livemouse....ask for clarification and enlightenment, why the installer is strange ...

Here in Windows 10 - no waiting times and no delays, what hardware have you built in?

 

windows 7. i have thousands of plugins. but it's true that many developers aren't looking for compat with win 7. I've never had a plugin stall for up to a minute before the knobs would become moveable. This says to me that something different than normal is happening, the plugin is looking for some resource or another, but it doesn't remain stalled, it actually 'starts' around a minute after loading the plugin. That means some process is happening that ultimately times out. i can't speculate on why other than that it's not meant for 7.

there's no compelling reason that i can think of that a freebie like this should need anything except a single .dll that can be moved from partition to partition without trouble, and distributed from a Zip or Rar file.

 

I understand you ! Maybe you can do something with it:

System requirements
Minimum system requirements

• Windows 7 (x32/x64), OpenGL 2.1 GFX card
• Mac OS X 10.11 - 11.0 (Intel , Arm), Metal GFX card
• SSE2 capable CPU

 

Strange, can't recall having this problem (Win7 PluginDoctor - not sure if I tested it with Reaper).

 

i test as many plugins as i have time for, usually everything that comes out. normally i use VstHost to do that.

the GUI of this one is giving me problems, laggy, artifacty, and not 100% responsive when loaded into Reaper.

but this could be because I install plugins like this in the sandbox and copy the .dll by itself into my main environment later, because I dislike installers. but there really should be no reason that a GUI would still function, yet function a little badly, just because I attempted to use the plugin as a portable. normally a gui wouldn't function at all if it had dependencies that the registry couldn't find.

that said, the GUI or something under the hood is messed up in a way that none of my thousands of other plugins are.

 

Well, in my case on win 10 it often shows clipping where there is none. Odd harmonics only are rendered following white noise curve...(?). And the difference in gain between 3rd and 5th harmonic is more than 30 dB...(?) On other 'character' settings saturation drops ~5dB @10kHz (where it is most wanted) and @16 kHz even to ~25dB. IMD is much higher than with SoundSpot Halcyon at the same level of saturation.

 

This is an outstanding saturator. It's got a similar vibe to Decapitator but functions less as a distortion and gives great alternate options. Doesn't have the same kind of sheen as the Black Box HG series style saturation so it's a great alternate option to add to all of these. Super thrilled with this one!