The Vaporizer 2 wavetable synth plugin is now free and open-source: a commercial-quality instrument you can download for nothing?

It’s proving to be quite the week for free wavetable synth plugins. First came Socalabs’ appropriately (if unimaginately) titled Wavetable, and now Vast Dynamics’ Vaporizer 2 has entered the freeware fray.

If you’re thinking the name sounds familiar, that’s because Vaporizer 2 was actually released in 2019, but back then, it came with a $40 price tag. Now Vast Dynamics is letting you download it for nothing - in fact, it’s gone the whole hog and made it open source.

Vaporizer 2 looked like a pretty good deal even when you had to pay for it, so unless you have some kind of chronic aversion to synths of this type, giving it a try now feels like a no-brainer. 

As well as rocking an engine that features four independent wavetable oscillator banks with up to 24-oscillator unison - plus a comprehensive wavetable editor - Vaporizer 2 also touches on additive, subtractive, FM and granular synthesis and includes a dedicated sampler section. There are filters, effects, LFOs, an arpeggiator, MPE support and modulation options, while 780+ wavetables and single cycles and 410+ presets should be more than enough to get you going.

When you’re done with those, you can import and edit standard format wavetables via drag and drop.

In short, you’re getting what looks like a commercial-quality feature set for nothing, and as a further bonus, CPU resource usage is said to be low, too. Vaporizer 2 is available now in VST/AU/AAX formats and can be downloaded from the Vast Dynamics website.