Best Bitcrusher VST

Let’s look at some interesting bitcrusher VST today. A bitcrusher is basically a lo-fi distortion effect and reduces the audio quality and adds a grainy & gritty sound to the mix. Why would you do that? Well the goal is most of the times to emulate older digital audio gear. This can be certain sampler like the MPC60 and SP1200 or Toy Keyboards. Here are our nominees for best bitcrusher VST:

OTO Biscuit. $249.

I have the hardware unit sitting on my desk and absolutely love it! Unfortunaltely there’s only like 1500 of these boxes produced. So it’s great to have a company like Softube model it as a VST plugin. I took my original OTO Biscuit to a friends place and we tried to compare them. I have to say that while I prefer the playability of the hardware unit (touching buttons, ya know!?), I couldn’t really hear a big difference in the plugin version. The Biscuit creates a really unique sounds and can be driven into oblivion. Fully recommend this bitcrusher to anyone! Watch how The Glitch Mob use the plugin in their productions below:

Decimort 2. €49.

When I don’t have my trusted Biscuit with me, then I usually rely on Decimort 2 by Polish plugin developers D16. What’s great about this one beside the sound is the excellent presets that let me quickly pick a starting point and tweak from there. There’s some experimental presets in there, but what I like most is that they have modelled the coloration and warmth characteristic of circuits from classic samplers recreated with painstaking accuracy. And they named them accordingly, so you don’t have to guess which preset resembles the MPC60, ASR10, etc.

Free Bitcrusher VST…

MeldaProduction MbitFun. Free.

MeldaProduction MbitFun is a serious tool for extreme distortion lovers. It converts the audio into limited fixed-point precision form, from a 1 single bit up to 16 bits per sample, and lets you access each bit, applying several operations.

Tritik Krush. Free.

Tritik offers a compact bit crusher VST named Krush that’ll cover most of your bit crushing needs. Aside from the downsampling & sample rate reduction you get analog modeled resonant filters and a modulation section which lets you modulate any parameter.

HY-Lofi2. Free.

HY-Lofi2 is really simple but effective Lo-Fi VST at the one thing it is supposed to do. Send any signal into the plugin and out comes a processed signal with something most people call “Dirt”.