Developer Audio Damage has released 33 of their legacy plugins for free download in a major overhaul of their official website. The plugins encompass the company’s history dating all the way back to 2002. They cover all musical needs, from the popular Discord pitch shifters (version 1-3), Basic monosynth, Kombinat distortion, and more.
There are various reasons Audio Damage are making this decision. Some they detailed in full on their blog:
Support Issues
Legacy Audio Damage users unable to upgrade when newer operating systems arrive leaves the company overwhelmed with emails. “Whenever Apple or Microsoft [introduces] a significant change to their respective platforms, hundreds or thousands of old customers come out of the woodwork looking for a 20-year-old installer… Just having these products out in the open will solve that issue,” the site explains.
Piracy
The rise of torrenting and popularity with unlicensed, underground plugin-sharing sites led to many pirated copies of the Audio Damage library. “Most of these installers are readily available in ‘cracked’ form, and someone that wants to use one of them is putting their computer (and thus their creative life) at risk of malware’, the site mentions in detail. “Having ‘blessed’ installers readily available from the source ensures that nobody will ever be punished for simply wanting to use one of our old products.”
Costly Updates
Making plugins is a time and money consuming task, a risk that Audio Damage would rather avoid.
The company writes, “Updating these older products to work on contemporary systems just doesn’t make much sense… the code libraries on which they’re based simply no longer exist… updating them would entail rewriting them almost in their entirety.”
Side Notes
Audio Damage mentions a few important things for user to take into consideration when downloading these plugins. While these plugins will remain free forever, future support for them has ended. This means older programs provided on the list may not work on newer operating systems and computers and newer plugins will eventually stop working. Older products may require registration codes, which are also given in select zip files.
As a final result of this giveaway, Audio Damage legacy plugin customers will receive a discount code – multi-version upgrading will no longer be supported.
Download the plugins and find more information on the Audio Damage website.
