Product Reviews by KVR Members

Refire is a very nice, albeit basic way to enhance digital drums and percussive sounds. Each of the five modules are useful if you just want to quickly dial in some basic settings, such as transient shaping, saturation, additional presence and clipping. My only minor gripe is the pitch knob for the sub module going from 0 to 12 in 0.1 intervals, rather than KNOCK's more familiar keys and accurate fine tune. It'd be a nice option to change that, albeit I'm not a developer so I don't know how hard that'd be to implement.

EDIT (12th July 2024): The sub module now has both editable frequency and key values, so the only problem I had was fixed.

A very simple plugin which does it's one desired task well, applying stereo width. Even with mono signals, this helps to bring instruments and synthesizers into stereo without being destructive, alongside being quite useful for widening already stereo sounds.

This is one of the best free synthesizers that I've tinkered around with. I'd say it's mostly ideal for tracks in the trance umbrella, because of the factory preset library (one of the best I've heard, including commercial synthesizers) and the unison per main oscillators being modeled off of the JP8000 supersaw.

The workflow of this synth is also really intuitive, everything is clearly laid out and quality patches can be dialed in with minimal effort. This includes the effects section, where adequate modulation and spatialisation can be done with little tweaking. This also applies to the arpeggiator / sequencer, where even if they're a little basic, great results can be made from them. Really nice for the price of nothing.

Very simple, albeit high quality limiter. The only current limiting model, Clarity One, is surprisingly clean but can also be pushed with the drive and saturate knobs if desired. Lots of visual feedback, GUI skinning and scaling are also appreciated.

SPAN is an absolute godsend.

I practically use it on every project file of mine, and for good reason. It's essentially the best spectrum analyzer for value (or ever), and to check on the mix and master is vital for making stuff sound listenable. Every little bit of information is readily available here (frequency, notes, db), the slope option is neat, and the best part is that it's stable. Avid FL 20 user, been continuously using this plugin for over a year and it hasn't crashed once. I love it.

There's a lot to like and dislike about this plugin. For starters, the 1/4 and 1/8 options are quite neat if you want some effective breaks. Unfortunately, when starting on a pattern more than once the slicing will go out of sync so you'll either have to record the sliced break when the plugin's first loaded or restart it entirely. Another thing what irks me is the 1/16 mode - when an amen break is sliced up in this instance, the kick just ends up feeling too short and not as impactful as before. Download this if you're looking for a simple, although lazy plugin to do basic break slicing - you might only get snippets worth of good slices, but it's better than having completely unedited samples.

I'd say this is one of the best free limiters/maximizers around, being somewhat comparable to LoudMax but a little louder and slightly less transparent when the input's cranked up. The only problem to me is that the GUI's pretty small, not resizable. You might also get some latency but it's not really noticeable, even lower than LoudMax's for me.

Pretty nice (and quite brainless) tool for giving anything a bit more character! The output is good for a plugin like this but I wish there were more controls, maybe different types of saturation or filters. Worth a download.