on the crust of the earth
breathing the air
below the clouds
and above the salt water
digital audio is 'old
rain falls from the sky,
food grows from the ground
TDR’s plugins deserve a mention - Kotelnikov’s handling of transients is dark magic. iZotope Vinyl should be here too, nothing else gets even close (that isn’t a turntable). Also love Luftikus - ends up on master in too many projects. Digits for phase distortion synth.
klanghelm has a couple of freeware slimmed-down versions of their full plugs: two compressors, dc1a and mjuc jr, and a pretty nice little saturator called IVGI.
'course, all of their plugs are like $30 anyway, so it’s worth throwing them some cash. dc2a is an astonishingly good compressor.
My goto plugin in every project is probably Liquisonic’s Reverberate https://www.liquidsonics.com/
And I do like to use this one here for which I’ve made the UI quite a lot as well: http://ju-x.com/frosting.html (which is not so obvious… once you’ve spent so much time on something, it’s not always the case that you feel like actually using them for making music )
Among the free ones, I still get back to Synth1 when I need a softsynth.
I really enjoy Podolski which is a soft synth from U-he a really solid German soft synth company. I like the other synth by them Tyrell N6. Both have really solid sound and flexibility.