Black Friday is November 27 this year, and plugin sales will be well under way before then. The deals are real, but the most common regret is buying a tool for a job that comes up twice a year. Before you add anything to your cart, check whether one of these does it for free.
All ten run in your browser. There's no sign-up, and for the ones that read a file, the audio is processed on your device and never uploaded.
1. Vocal remover: before you buy a karaoke plugin
The vocal remover cancels whatever sits in the centre of a stereo mix, which is usually the lead vocal, and keeps the bass below 150 Hz so the low end survives. It's quick and good enough for a practice track.
The honest limit: centre-cancelling needs a stereo file, so it refuses mono. It also takes out anything else panned dead centre. When you need clean, separate stems, Stem Separation in the Studio uses a neural model instead: 6 credits for vocals, drums, bass and other.
2. Pitch shifter and tempo changer: before you buy a time-stretch plugin
The pitch shifter changes the key without changing the speed, or slows a song down without changing its pitch. Use it to move a song into your vocal range, or to learn a fast solo at 70% speed. It's built on Signalsmith Stretch, an open-source time-stretching library.
3. AI noise reducer: before you buy a restoration suite
The noise reducer runs DeepFilterNet, a neural speech-enhancement model published by researchers at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität, entirely in your browser. It's made for voice: podcasts, voice-overs, phone recordings with hum or hiss underneath.
4. Loudness meter: before you buy a metering plugin
The loudness meter measures integrated LUFS, true peak, sample peak and loudness range to the ITU-R BS.1770 standard. It then shows how much Spotify, YouTube and Apple Music would turn the track down, or up. For a release check, that's most of what a paid meter is used for.
5. Audio to MIDI: before you buy a transcription tool
The audio to MIDI converter turns a sung melody, a bass line or a riff into a MIDI file you can drag into any DAW. It works best on one note at a time, so hum the melody rather than feeding it a full mix.
6. Key, BPM and chord finder: before you buy an analysis app
The key and BPM finder reads the key, tempo and chord progression of any song you drop in. DJs use it to match tracks, and producers use it to find a sample's key before chopping it.
7. Audio trimmer: before you buy an editor you'll open once
The audio trimmer cuts a file to the part you want, adds fades so the edges don't click, and saves it as MP3 or WAV. It also makes ringtones.
8–10. Tap BPM counter, metronome and tuner: before you buy an app for each
- The tap BPM counter works out the tempo when you tap along, with a mouse, a key or a touchscreen.
- The metronome has accents, time signatures and tap tempo. It's timed by the audio clock, so it doesn't drift the way timer-based web metronomes do.
- The tuner works with guitar, ukulele, violin, cello or voice through your microphone, using the YIN pitch-detection method with a fine-tuning stage on top.
So what is worth buying?
Spend your Black Friday money where a free tool genuinely runs out:
- Things you use every session. An instrument or effect you'll reach for daily earns its price back. A once-a-year utility doesn't.
- Things your browser can't do. Hosting third-party plugins live, low-latency monitoring through an audio interface, and big sample libraries all belong in a desktop app.
- Monitoring. Decent headphones or speakers improve every decision you make, and no software substitutes for them.
What happens after the free tool
Each tool ends with the same hand-off: open the result in the SoundGen Studio, where the same engines run inside a full DAW, alongside AI generation, stem separation and mixing. You don't need it to use the tools, but it's there when a quick fix turns into a project.
Sources
- ITU-R Recommendation BS.1770, Algorithms to measure audio programme loudness and true-peak audio level: itu.int
- Spotify for Artists — Loudness normalization: support.spotify.com
- Schröter, Escalante-B., Rosenkranz & Maier — DeepFilterNet: A Low Complexity Speech Enhancement Framework for Full-Band Audio based on Deep Filtering, ICASSP 2022: arXiv:2110.05588
- Signalsmith Audio — Signalsmith Stretch (MIT licence): github.com/Signalsmith-Audio/signalsmith-stretch
- de Cheveigné & Kawahara — YIN, a fundamental frequency estimator for speech and music, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 111(4), 2002: doi.org/10.1121/1.1458024
SoundGen Team
Written by the team building SoundGen
