In the world of freeware VST instruments and effects, I have several new recommendations (which I'm sure is only of interest to, of my regular readers, maybe Mike, Jeremy and possibly Allen).

First of all, many of these I found on a music blog I recently discovered, Rekkerd.org.

For synths, Cymbiant by Osiris is kind of a one trick pony at first glance, in that it does a passable Supersaw trance lead sound. With a little fx in your signal chain, and you can create some monster leads. Quite nice. I'm sure it has other uses as well. But that's mainly what attracted me to it.

For mangling and twisting drum loops (or anything else), Beatburner by Code Audio was recently released for free. It's quite nice. Breathes some very new life into old and tired loops. Use it with some glitchifier like yer beatrepeaters, Glitch, or supatrigga and you've got instant tech-glitch loops to play with.

There was recently some discussion of Antress, who made some very interesting mastering type of plugins, for free, but whose website seems to be down. At any rate, backup copies of them are available here. Of particular use to me were the Exciter and the Expander. Very nice for breathing some life into the sound of a mix.

Finally, since Jack Dark released the source code of his old Darkware VSTs, Pluggotic have made a modified version of one of his crazy glitchifiers, called Shattersync. It's a stuttering effect that is synced to the host BPM. Quite nice.

At any rate. Hope you like these, those of you who are into this kind of thing. I've found all of these quite useful.