Arriving with this weekend’s giveaways are some big freebies from Universal Audio and Native Instruments (now parent of iZotope). If you act fast, that includes iZotope’s Tonal Balance Control for free, through the US holiday weekend ending late Monday. Let’s break down the offers and tools.
CDM earns a 1000% commission on these downloads. Of zero. I’m kidding. No, let’s look frankly at whether you want to bother downloading these, starting with the one that ends tomorrow:
iZotope Tonal Balance Control 2
iZotope’s Tonal Balance Control 2 sounds like a tonal balancer; see Baby Audio’s Smooth Operator Pro 2 for which I made some presets. But that’s not what this plug-in does. On its own, this is just a visualizer/meter.
What’s cool about this is that you can quickly use it to show not just the metering, but a comparison to a target curve. You can load in your reference track to show the curve for that track, or they have 12 target curves to get you started.
Now, iZotope did design this to work with their other plug-ins, via an extra included in this bundle called Relay.Relay also includes some other handy utilities and additional metering.
So if you’re already happy with SOP or other EQ and dynamics tools, it might still be worth downloading the freebie here just to try some alternative visualizations. I expect that could be useful to people learning; it’s not that you want the meter to become a crutch, but it can help to actively reflect on what you’re hearing.
iZotope Tonal Balance Control 2
For the free download, you’ll need an iZotope account. (I got stuck on this as my password manager was confused when it saw the new NI domain – fair warning.) You then need just a serial number authorization, though – no additional download manager needed. (Yay.)
This also has native Apple Silicon support across AAX, AU, and VST3, plus the usual Intel Mac and Windows support. (That’s confusing in the system requirements, which is why I mention it.)
They also have some decent tutorials, like an explanation of tonal balance and a breakdown of Grammy nominees for 2025.
Universal Audio PolyMAX
There’s not much more to say – I love PolyMAX, we all love PolyMAX, I’ve talked about PolyMAX before. Now it’s free through June 30th, coinciding with UA’s Half Yearly Sale. (Yes, I know, UA does sales the way hobbits do meals; I think this is Elevenses.)
But PolyMAX is a great bread-and-butter synth, deceptively simple, and very focused. You very likely already have it, but if not – you go.
And it is capable of not just vanilla synth sounds, but also more modulation than you might think:
Ozone Imager is now in Komplete Start – but Reaktor Blocks is gone?!
This is more bad news than good news. The good news is, yes, there’s a new Komplete Start free bundle. That includes the Kontakt 8 Player, which has some interesting additions like the Phrases tools, plus some great effects that were already part of the freebie (iZotope Trash Lite, Replika delay, Raum reverb, and more). It’s well worth a download. The new addition announced this week is iZotope Ozone Imager, which is a strong stereo imaging meter in case you don’t already have one in your DAW or plug-in folder.
Now the bad news: it looks like the free modular tools for Reaktor are gone. Komplete Start used to include the wonderful Reaktor 6 Player and Blocks Prime. Maybe some bean counter at NI and its parent private equity monolith noticed that that was free, as it’s gone from Komplete Start where it used to be and now “on sale” for 24,75 € versus a 99€ list. (There was also the player-compatible Blocks Base, which now I can’t find and – honestly, I can’t recall the difference between Base and Prime.)
How to get started with modular synths for free
Free Blocks, live-coding, and more: Let’s explore Toybox Audio’s REAKTOR toolkits
My Toybox tutorial should still work as it is compatible with Reaktor 6 Player, which is still listed as a free download. But you’ll see that both these articles reference Komplete Start.
I’ve contacted NI media relations for clarification on this one. The availability of these free tools spawned countless online tutorials and encouraged the inclusion of the tools in teaching. Two such tutorials are even hosted on NI’s own site – one written by yours truly:
I had already shifted to teaching VCV Rack in place of Reaktor Blocks because it’s free as in freedom, with an open source license. That guarantees it’s not subject to the whims of faceless financial conglomerates. But that’s not to say I want to see the work that went into Reaktor modular tools go to waste. And I can’t overstate this enough: we’re all very concerned about the health of Reaktor and the future of its development, which seems very much in question.
I hope I’m wrong, and that magically, if you download Reaktor Player, the licenses are still there. If you already have your Blocks license, though, you should be entirely safe to go ahead and authorize the new Komplete Start and get more new stuff:
We’ll do what we do every week: try to klear up the Komplete Konfusion.
Spotted more freebies? Sound off and let us know. I mean, apart from things that are always free.