One idea behind every tool here: fold several sound-shaping factors into a single plugin so the controls react to each other instead of sitting in a long chain. GOLDSMELT, the first plugin of the Golden Series, takes that idea all the way and melts the seven originals into one. Everything is free to download for macOS and Windows.
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Golden Series · New
GOLDSMELT
Seven plugins melted into one device
VST3macOSWindowsFreeGolden Seriesv1.0.2
Everything MFKNE has built so far, in one plugin. GOLDSMELT takes the heart of all seven earlier effects and lets them play together instead of side by side. Put it on a sound and decide how far you want to go: a touch of warmth and air so a track simply sits better, a new character for a part that has gone stale, or a full meltdown into stutter, grains and noise.
The panel reads like a route. FORGE shapes the body, makes a hit snap or a pad swell. SHATTER takes the sound apart: it catches a moment and repeats it, scatters it into grains, or freezes it into a held sound with no beginning and no end. SMELT pours it all back together, into a room, onto tape and through GOLD, the one stage whose only job is to make what you have sound finer.
Every stage follows the same clock and listens to the same signal. The cuts, the grains and the texture land on the beat together, and the room steps back when the next hit arrives. That is why GOLDSMELT behaves like one device and not like seven plugins in a row.
Start from one of eight factory patches, from Golden to Total Ruin, right in your host's own preset menu. Or turn everything to zero and build your own: at zero, GOLDSMELT passes your sound through untouched.
What you can do with it
From a little polish to total ruin.
A few of the places GOLDSMELT can take a sound. They are starting points, not the limits.
DRUMS
Make a groove hit and breathe
PUNCH brings the attack forward, LIFT pulls up everything between the hits, and SLICE turns the end of a bar into a stutter fill that sits exactly on the grid.
PADS
Turn a pad into a place
BLEED spreads a single note into unison voices and octaves, SHIMMER lets the tail climb upwards, and SPACE takes it from a close room to a hall.
VOCALS
Give a voice warmth
GOLD adds the overtones the ear hears as warmth and lays them on the body of a note rather than on its attack, so the voice gets fuller without getting harsh.
FREEZE
Hold a moment
Catch a piece with SLICE, hold it with FREEZE and change its length while it plays. The held sound has no start and no end, and the change does not click.
ARPS
Lock it to the groove
With SYNC on, the grains follow the grid. An arpeggio turns into a rhythmic shimmer that moves with the track instead of floating over it.
RUIN
Break it on purpose
BURN runs from clean through fuzz into digital decay, DUST lays a texture underneath and MATERIAL decides what it is made of. Total Ruin shows the far end.
The panel
Fourteen controls. Three rows. One signal path.
The panel reads from top to bottom, the way the sound travels. Each of the fourteen controls was checked to make an audible difference, and none of them clicks when you move it during playback.
FORGE
The body
PUNCHBrings the attack forward and leaves sustained sound alone.
LIFTParallel upward compression. Raises what lies between the hits.
BLEEDUnison voices plus an octave below and above. Its upper half opens the room as well, so one knob runs from narrow to wide.
BURNOne turn from clean through fuzz into digital decay, with the level held steady all the way.
SHATTER
The breakup
SLICECuts a piece on the beat grid and repeats it, from 1/2 down to 1/128.
SHIMMERAn octave shifter inside the reverb. Every pass lifts the tail one octave higher.
GRAINThe size of the grains, as a note value from the shared clock.
DUSTHow much texture lies under the sound.
MATERIALWhat that texture is made of.
FREEZE holds the slice. SYNC locks the grains to the grid. BYPASS takes the whole row out in one move.
SMELT
The cast
SPACETempo-locked echoes and a room behind them. Low is close and dense, high is a hall.
TAPEA tape stage over everything the plugin has built.
GOLDThe refining stage. Warmth, air and a gentle density. The only gold knob on the panel.
WIDTHThe one stage that owns the stereo image.
MIXA plain crossfade between your sound and the result.
Factory patches
Eight places to start
They live in your host's own preset menu, no extra browser. Every one leaves between 3.3 and 10.5 dB of headroom.
GOLDENThe patch it loads with. Refining with a little texture.
CLEAN SLATEEverything off. Your sound, untouched.
DRUMSPercussive, with the middle row open.
PADSWide and long.
ARPEGGIOSYNC on, grains on the grid.
VOICERestrained, body before texture.
CATHEDRALThe big room.
TOTAL RUINThe other end.
The facts
Technical details
Version
1.0.2
Format
VST3 only (no AU, AAX or VST2)
Type
Audio effect, stereo and mono, no MIDI
macOS
Universal Binary for Apple Silicon and Intel, macOS 11 or later. Signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple.
Windows
64-bit, C runtime linked statically, no Visual C++ redistributable needed
Sample rates
Tested at 44.1, 48, 88.2, 96 and 192 kHz
Buffer sizes
Tested from 1 to 4096 samples
Latency
480 samples at 48 kHz (10.00 ms), reported to the host for compensation
CPU
8.11 % of one core in the worst case (stereo, 48 kHz, 256-sample buffers, every control at maximum)
Controls
14 knobs and 3 switches, 17 automatable parameters
Patches
8 factory patches as host programs
Window
Scalable from 75 to 150 percent
Price
Free
All figures are our own measurements from the plugin's test program, 282 checks on version 1.0.0. Versions 1.0.1 and 1.0.2 leave the audio processing unchanged.
Questions
GOLDSMELT FAQ
Does GOLDSMELT run natively on Apple Silicon?
Yes. The macOS version is a Universal Binary. It runs natively on Apple Silicon and on Intel Macs, from macOS 11.
Is there an AU or AAX version?
No. GOLDSMELT comes as VST3 only, for macOS and Windows.
Is it signed and notarized for macOS?
Yes, from version 1.0.1. The macOS version is signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple, and the notarization ticket is stapled to the plugin, so macOS can check it even without an internet connection. Version 1.0.0 was not notarized. If you still have it, replace it with the current version or use the quarantine fix in the install notes below.
How much latency does it have?
480 samples at 48 kHz, which is 10.00 ms. GOLDSMELT reports its latency to the host, and the host compensates for it.
Does Windows need the Visual C++ redistributable?
No. The C runtime is linked statically, so nothing extra has to be installed.
Is GOLDSMELT really free?
Yes. Download it, use it in your projects, no account needed. If you want to support the work, there is an optional PayPal link below.
The original seven
Where GOLDSMELT comes from.
Seven single tools came first. Each of them is still here, still free and worth having on its own.
VST3macOSWindowsFreev1.0.2
TONEBLEED
Stacked octaves driven into a fuzz
TONEBLEED multiplies the signal before it distorts, and that order is the whole point. BLEED stacks copies of what comes in: three drifting unison voices per channel, then a granular octave below, then a granular octave above, so the stage behind it saturates a chord instead of a single note. Intermodulation between octave-related copies is consonant, between arbitrary partials it is not. FUZZ is two soft clipping stages with 14 and 12 dB of gain in front of them and a treble cut at 4.5 kHz between, running at 2x oversampling through a 97-tap half-band filter so the top end stays clean instead of folding back. It carries its own tone stack that closes down as the control opens, the way a pedal gets darker the harder you push it. GRAIN breaks the fuzzed signal into a cloud of four voices, sixty percent an octave up and forty percent unison read from a fresh position each grain, and the grain length is a note value taken from the host tempo, an eighth down to a sixty-fourth, so the sidebands a short window creates land in time with the track. AGE is transport and magnetics in one: three sine LFOs per channel on mutually prime rates plus a band-limited random drift on the read position, then soft asymmetric saturation and a head loss from 19 kHz down to 8 kHz. Past 45 percent BLEED also opens a sixteen-line plate behind everything, and AGE pulls that plate along with it. With all four controls at zero the output is the input delayed by the 52 samples the plugin reports to the host, 1.08 ms at 48 kHz, and nothing else.
GRAINWASH is not another shimmer reverb. Most of them lay their octaves across a track as an even sheet. This one listens to the piece. Its shimmer swells on every subdivision of the host tempo, so the octaves arrive as a pulse rather than a fog, and it opens further wherever the source falls away, so it answers the phrase instead of covering it. Both run with no control of their own, and the pulse needs the transport running. Underneath sits a room meant seriously: SPACE drives a tempo-synced multitap delay and a thirty-two line reverb network at once, from a tight slap to a wide rhythmic pattern running into a 3.85 second tail that measures 0.2 dB from ideally decaying noise. SHIMMER puts a granular octave shifter inside the reverb feedback and a tuned resonator on what comes out of it, so the tail rises and sings. GRAIN sets what the shimmer is made of, a grain window from an eighth note down to a sixty-fourth. WASH runs the lot through a tape machine and decides how much of it reaches the output and how wide it stands. The space also ducks itself: an internal sidechain driven by the dry input keeps the tail out of the way of every transient, with nothing to route. The dry path is left alone throughout: not delayed, not filtered, and bit-identical over most of the control field, and the plugin reports zero latency.
Punch up front, dust in the tail, density underneath
PUNCHDUST pulls three moves at once. It drags the attack forward, trails a grainy lo-fi texture into the decay and lifts the whole sustain from underneath, so a thin signal turns dense and physical while the transient peaks stay where they were. One detector pass per sample on the mono sum drives all of it, which keeps the stereo image locked. The engine runs 48 samples ahead, 1.0 ms at 48 kHz, and reports that latency to the host, so texture and lift are already in position when the hit lands. What the plugin adds is strictly the difference between the processed and the dry signal, so the source itself never gets filtered or compressed. PUNCH is a dual-stage transient shaper that tracks its own baseline and touches the attack only, then pushes it into a soft clipper at 2x oversampling through a 97-tap linear-phase half-band filter, so the highs stay crisp instead of aliasing. DUST blends 5-bit rasterized crackle with warm analog hiss and opens only in the gaps where the source falls away, trailing the material instead of sitting under it. SQUEEZE is parallel upward compression that pulls low-level sustain up by as much as 26 dB with transients left out, while automatic gain compensation locks the peaks to unity. TILT is a balance filter around 700 Hz on the added signal alone, bass to the left, treble to the right, and a true bypass with PUNCH and SQUEEZE at zero.
PULSEMELT is not one box doing one thing. Four engines share a single signal path: a tempo-locked delay, a reverb, a continuous morph from clean through tape into bitcrush, and asynchronous pitch drift. What ties them together is that the whole space steps aside on its own. The tail ducks under the signal that feeds it, so transients stay in front while the modulated texture fills the rhythmic gaps behind them. No sidechain wiring, no bus routing, no companion plugin: put it on the track and turn MELT up. The detector runs 3 ms ahead of the audio path and reports that lookahead to the host, so the tail is already out of the way before the hit lands. The dry path gets no filter, no saturation and no compression, so every attack passes through exactly as it came in. SPACE sets room size and tempo-locked feedback, GRIT morphs in one sweep from clean through tape into bit and sample rate reduction, DRIFT adds asynchronous pitch modulation from three unrelated LFOs per channel, and MELT scales wet amount and ducking depth together, up to 85 percent wet and 28 dB of gain reduction.
TEXTURETAP listens for hits in your signal and drops a short percussive texture on every onset. A fast onset detector fires exactly once per transient and triggers voices from a small polyphonic pool, each scaled by how hard the hit was. MATERIAL morphs the sound continuously across paper and dust, wood and typewriter, glass and metal. DECAY sets how long the textures ring, SENSITIVITY decides whether only the loud hits count or every fine detail comes alive.
A tape delay with a worn-out transport. A write head lays down your signal plus softly limited feedback, a moving read head plays it back with real wow and flutter. WARP bends the pitch with slow wow, faster flutter and random drift. STRETCH glides to new delay times, so the audio pitches up and down like a real capstan. Push FEEDBACK past 100 percent and an analogue-style soft limiter keeps it singing instead of screaming. From tight slapback to drifting, self-oscillating clouds.
Slice, repeat and slowly destroy. GLITCHRUIN locks to your host tempo, grabs a fragment off the beat grid and repeats it, then drags the whole signal through waveshaping, bitcrushing and a closing low-pass. A single macro, RUIN, drives all three stages at once, from a subtle stutter to full collapse. Choose the flavour of the damage with VIBE (Tape, Tube or Digital), hold a fragment forever with FREEZE, and set MIX and WIDTH to taste.
They are free and they stay free. No account, no mailing list, no strings attached. If one of them earns its place in your projects, you can send whatever it is worth to you. It keeps the next one coming.
ⓘBuilt to run clean. Written in C++ with JUCE. VST3 audio effects, every parameter automatable and saved with your project. macOS ships as a Universal Binary (Apple Silicon and Intel), Windows as a 64-bit build. Available for macOS and Windows. The macOS builds are signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple, with the notarization ticket stapled to each plugin, so macOS can check them even without an internet connection. Every download here is guaranteed virus-free.
↺Which version is this? The version number next to each plugin is the version inside its download, and the SHA-256 checksums belong to exactly that build. When a plugin is updated, the number goes up and the checksums change. Not sure which version you have installed? Download the current one and replace the old .vst3 folder with it. Version 1.0.2 (GRAINWASH 1.5.3) is a maintenance build: built with an updated framework, and every download now includes the license texts of the third-party components. Sound and controls stay the same, and settings saved with earlier versions load unchanged. Since version 1.0.1 (GRAINWASH 1.5.2) the macOS builds are signed and notarized.
⇩How to install. Download the ZIP, unzip it, and copy the .vst3 folder into your system VST3 folder. On Windows and on macOS this is a folder, not a single file, so copy it as a whole. Then restart your DAW and rescan your plugins.
macOS:/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3 (all users) or ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3 (your user only). Tip: in Finder use Go → Go to Folder and paste the path. Windows:C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3 (standard location for all 64-bit hosts).
⚙macOS: older downloads only. The current versions are notarized, so this step should no longer be needed for them. Versions downloaded before 1.0.1 (GRAINWASH before 1.5.2) are not notarized, and macOS tags every file you download from the web. Your DAW may then skip such a plugin during the scan or refuse to load it. The simplest fix is to replace it with the current version. If you want to keep the older one, one line in Terminal removes that flag. Open Terminal, paste the line, press Return and enter your Mac password.sudo xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3Installed into your user folder instead? Then use ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3 and leave out the sudo. The line covers every plugin in that folder, not only the ones from here. Nothing inside the plugin is touched, the flag is file metadata. Restart your DAW and rescan afterwards.
VST is a registered trademark of Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH.
