Novation has discontinued the V-Station and Bass Station Synthesizer plugins and made them available as a free download.
The lifetime of plugins always depends primarily on how long a developer offers support for them. In the last few weeks and months, many companies have decided to release discontinued aka legacy plugins as a free download.
After Audio Damage and ToneBoosters, Novation has now released its old plugins as free downloads.
Novation V-Station Bass Station Free Download
The V-Station is an 8-voice polyphonic Synthesizer plugin that uses three oscillators ported from the K-Station hardware Synthesizer. These offer multiple waveforms, FM as well as ring modulation.
Then, they are followed by a rich filter and a versatile Novation effects section. The latter includes reverb, chorus, phaser, delay, panning, distortion, and EQ. The V-Station plugin ships with 200 factory presets and 400 available user programs.
The second plugin is Bass Station which is a recreation of the classic Bass Station analog Synthesizer from 1993. The developers have carefully modeled the engine to maintain the distinct character of the iconic original unit.
It features two oscillators with sawtooth and square waveforms, oscillator sync, and a classic ladder filter with 12/24 dB lowpass characteristics. On the modulation side, you get easily routable LFOs for parameter modulations (PWM, filter cutoff…) as well as an ADSR envelope. The filter has its own filter envelope with its own set of ADSR controls.
Further, Bass Station plugin ships with 100 new sounds from warm deep basses to screaming leads. Both plugins are nice virtual instruments with good feature sets. If you are looking for the classic Novation sound, you get the opportunity to use it in your DAW for free.
Novation V-Station and Bass Stations are available now as a free download. They run as a VST and AU plugin on macOS (10.14 with Intel only) and Windows. Attention, the developers don’t offer Apple M1 support and you need to try if they work on your system. The plugins can be downloaded from the support site.
Update: It seems that the plugins don’t run equally well in all DAWs and systems. It’s more of a trial and error thing. I tried them on my Mac M1 with Ableton Live 11.2 and they don’t work.
More information here: Novation
good
For those getting tired of paying companies for software with an expiry date, you’re better off going for freeware with lifetime support from developers such as Full Bucket (synths) and Airwindows (fx plugins). Free (although they deserve all the donations they can get) and always reliable.
What a trip to come here and see me from years ago! (THANK YOU.) These were faves back in the day, and I wish they got updated to more modern Novation equivalents.
That was several Macs ago that I made that video. I can’t get V-Station to show up on the Apple Silicon-native Ableton Live 11.2 either — it doesn’t even show up as a “AUv2”, which is a shame. Ah well, for everyone who can run ’em… enjoy!!!
Thanks, Torley for your comment 🙂 I totally loved your videos from years ago 🙂 It would be great if Novation bring updates but I think that will be not case.
Yes
As a big fan of my Novation KS4 (love the sound, despite having seriously dodgy encoders), this was a very pleasant surprise. Downloaded it last night, opened it in Reason, and went to bed much later than I planned. Sounds just as nice as my KS4. Thank-you Novation!
I can’t activate the software once installed. 🙁
Paying for software synths is more likely to give you “future use,” and it helps programmers support their families. For this support, musicians should be able to have access to this software in the future.
When companies like Novation (Focusrite) pull this kind of stunt, it is so difficult for an artist that recorded with it. If you ever want to remix a track, you can’t. If you started a project and didn’t have time to finish, now you can’t. You have to find a new synth track, and finding one that works as well as the one you chose previously is not as easy as it sounds.
Focusrite/Novation should not just release it for free, they should release the code as open source. This should be required by law. Then freelance coders can earn money keeping it supported or Apple and/or Windows can make it part of their features and keep it supported for their users.
Being able to remix is so important, and being able to come back to a project and finish it later is detrimental to most musicians, so Novation do the right thing and just make it “open source.”