sound affairs & audio effect design
As of now the “BootEQ mkII” musical EQ and pre-amp simulator is released under freeware license and a copy is ready to download for you. Release info and download locations are maintained in the sticky “latest versions / downloads” post. Please read and accept the enduser license agreement before downloading and installing.
Requirements: SSE compatible PC, VST host running at 44,1 or 48kHz samplerate.
Download here.
[UPDATE]Freeware-EQ BootEQ in Version 2 erhältlich…
Der BootEQ düfte vielen Musikern bekannt sein. Das Freeware-Plugin im Retro-Style genießt einen sehr guten ruf hat auch wirklich einen tollen Klang. Nun hat Bootsy die zweite Version des Plugins angekündig, das optisch an eine Mischung…
[…] has released BootEQmkII, a freeware equalizer/pre-amp simulator VST effect plug-in for Windows PC. BootEQ mkII is basically […]
[…] has released BootEQmkII, a freeware equalizer/pre-amp simulator VST effect plug-in for Windows […]
Variety Of Sound 
THANK YOU BOOTSY!!!
Thanks you very much bootsie! I’ll keep you posted…
thank you, Bootsie !
thanx alot
Hi Herbert,
congratulations on the release!
Sounds and looks gorgeous 😉
Best regards,
Patrick
Many, many thanks Patrick for your efforts, your great ideas on the visual concept and the outstanding execution!
Another immensely useful and wonderful sounding tool, folks, read the manual and the tutorial on this site and start to explore !
This is not your garden variety EQ, but once you got the hang of the low frequency options it’s pure magic. 🙂
Thank you for all the inspiring stuff, bootsie !
And Patrick, if it looks gorgeous somebody must have invested a good few hours in the GUI. 😉
And succeeded, for sure.
Especially love the dynamic shadow at the DRV knob !
Big thanks to you, too !
Sounds really good and I like the subtile exciter-effect of the tube-stage! Rock on!
Well done, looking forward to trying it.
I must add my appreciation for these plugins to Bootsy, and the quality of information and layout of the website.
Absolutely informative website, and the quality of the manuals exceeds that of some ‘big boy’ commercial grade plugins.
I hope that either some big boys snap Bootsy up, so that he gets rewarded for his labor of excellence, or he is able to release his work commercially and get rewarded also.
The Interfaces, graphics are outstanding, almost real.
Best wishes from me
Blessed Ears.
Hey bootsy,
beautiful!!!
Emmmmmh, I mean the pre-amp………….
Thanks for sharing
fotost
THANK YOU!!!!
Can’t wait to put it to use!
Your work just keeps getting better and better.
Cheers.
gracias .. merci … thanks bootsy man 🙂
Cheers mate!
Greetings from Bockenheim!
Wow, thank you very much for your continued, oh so generous offerings.
Giving away these so beautiful looking, sweet sounding plugins to the masses, really means a lot to me (and I’m sure to others as well). And not in the sense of getting stuff for free. 😉
All the best,
Raphael
Bootsie,
Reaper. AMD 64 3200+. Everytime I run multiple instances of BootEQMKII (about 8 or 12) and close Reaper it crashes like all your plug-ins.
Reaper closes but some secs later this gets displayed:
NOTE: It happens in both official and alpha versions
Hi Bootsy !
I’m from Japan,and my English is very poor,sorry.
I’m your fan since your Rescue released.
Congratulations of Boot EQ mkⅡ on release. I am to be going to enjoy it very much.
Thank you Bootsy !
Hi Bootsy,
Any chance you can come up with Density in the same
GUI design as BootEQ mkII, I would love to use those
two as a winning pair.
Density is the Fairchild “soundalike”,just a little diffecult
to see all the controls.
I know its wishful thinking,but I guess I am allowed to do
that sometimes.
All the best and thank you again for your wonderful stuff!!
I agree with Terje,
Density is quite nice, but interface makes it a little difficult to navigate comfortably, it’s an ergonomics thing.
Thanks mate!
bootsie deserves a break
Now THIS is an EQ plugin! No other musical EQ can touch it, really! The Pultec was a plugin I was looking at getting for a long time (either a used hardware one, T-Racks 3, or UAD), but I think this plugin is way better, I mean, really way better than a Pultec. And that preamp section is soooo sweet. I can’t wait to play with it more! (Two piano gigs in one day, yikes!)
That being said, I can’t wait for your next plugin Bootsy! I still use Epicverb as my mastering reverb on every track since you released it, and I’m always telling my producer friends about your plugins at both the FLipside and Imageline forums.
So here are my two requests of you. First, Bootsy, for heaven’s sake, take a week off! You have put so much thought and research into this plugin and your others as well, and for that I’m extremely grateful.
Then, when your rest is complete, please tell us what you’re going to plan for your next plugin. I was kind of hoping it’d be an opto compressor with seperate attack/release controls. (And not a Density 2.0 either, because though Density has its limitations, I love it for what it is.) If not an opto compressor, I know I won’t be disappointed with whatever you decide as your next project. 😉 Cheers mate.
Hi !
This plugin sounds sweet. The new preamp section really adds something to the sound, in a subtle way.
For people complaining about it being “too subtle”, I think they have to look at the TesslaSE plugin, from bootsy too.
Or look elsewhere for a saturation plugin :).
Congratulations on the release,
Jay Key
By the way, Patrick, you’re the man !
I hope you’ll keep working with Herbert for the next plugins, because to be honest I did not really like the desing of epicVerb, kind of “plastic looking”.
But on this one, you made a GREAT job ! The color codes on the knobs really makes it fast to understand and tweak/use.
But that metal design, so smooth =D…
Thanks dude.
Appreciate it.
FANTASTIC! The pre-amp section in particular is amazing. It makes stuff fat and rounded in a really nice way, really high quality sound! best saturation plugin yet.
i had a strange bug in cubase 4.5, but my install has been a bit weird, so it may be my setup needs a fresh format.
on a track the VU meter ‘pegged’ at 6 instead of to the right in the red. however much i turned the drive or volume of the source material it would not go higher. the sound was the same as if it was in the red… anyone else get this?
THANKS again for making this free, you will get many great rewards from the cosmos 🙂
Hey Bootsy,
first off kudos on releasing such high quality plugins, I’m new to them but EpicVerb is already rocking my world. I’m a programmer and UI guy myself so I know how much work goes into all this.
I’m just playing with BootEQII at the unsupported 88.2k, and it sounds fine to me. Is it just going to sound ‘different’ (but OK) than at a supported freq, or are there definite bad artifacts to watch out for?
@gl: the answer is given here in this post: https://varietyofsound.wordpress.com/2009/01/10/booteq-and-samplerate-support/
I see, am I correct in saying that you could simply disable this code at >= 88.2k as frequencies are unlikely to reach Nyquist there (or if they do they wouldn’t need correcting)?
unfortunately it’s a little bit more complicated, otherwise I would have already done this …
Right, lots of tuning involved … anyway, sounding great even @ 88.2k.
Hey what are awesome plugs, I could not believe my ears. It’s a labour of love. A truly amazing gift. My favs are bootEQMKII, RescueAE, NastyCS and epicVerb. You’ve just kicked URS and Waves in their teeth. But please don’t sell yourself to those money milking gangsters. If you get stuck and need some food in your fridge set up a PayPal donation account and we’ll give you support you deserve.
Thank you.
Found a bug in your UI code. The dials are impossible to control on a multi-monitor setup when the GUI isn’t on the main monitor.
I think the problem specifically is that it doesn’t handle negative mouse coords – I have 3 screens, arranged as left/center/below center, so both additional screens give negative x or y mouse coords.
gl,
afaics this is not BootEQ’s fault.
Never had that issue with any of Bootsie’s plugins.
Plugins open on screen 2 as default.
nVidia 7600 / 2x 26″ / XP64 / C5
susiwong,
I don’t have this problem with any other plugins. How have you configured your two screens? If you’ve set the 2nd screen to the right of the main one, then your desktop coordinates are all positive – but if its below or to the left, then some of them are negative and I’m pretty sure that’s what’s causing the issue. Try that.
After the great sound the next best thing about your stuff is ease of use. [density is the exception, as above] Its almost like I designed the layout for myself = less thinking, more tweaking. Genius.
Steve
gl,
out of curiosity I tried swapping the monitors in order to get negative x-coordinates (why reinvent the wheel ?), works just fine here, even when positioned across both monitors.
List your relevant hard/software, maybe someone will come up with a solution.
Ok, monitors back to normal, makes me seasick. 😉
When you say swapping, did you swap them in the display control panel?
Actually you don’t get the problem if you just have two side by side (regardless of the order). It’s caused by having one _below_ the other. Try that.
In display properties, normally I have 1 – 2, dragged 2 to the left side of 1, giving me 2 – 1. Windows now shows negative x values for one monitor.
Too bad about the mouse jump when you don’t physically move the monitors, too. 😉
For 3 screens you’ll need 2 VGAs, are they running off a single driver ? I used to run 3×19″ CRTs on 2×6200 cards for years, not a single glitch.
Try above and below, causes the problem even with two screens.
(yep, same driver, two Nivida cards).
BTW, if you hit the ‘reply’ button, your replies stay inside the same thread.
Tried the remaining two variants, sorry, everything works fine except that I’m feeling a bit dizzy now.
Might be a mouse driver issue too, now that I think of it.
Logitech SetPoint tuned with uberoptions here, highly recommended.
It turns out there are two different issues here:
I have a Wacom graphics tablet (that I use instead of a mouse), and a USB mouse.
The ‘knob going crazy’ (jumping around whilst clicking on it) only happens in Rescue (of the ones I’ve tried), and only when it’s not on the main screen. It happens with the tablet or the mouse.
On other plugs (EpicVerb, BootEQII) the mouse works fine on any screen/configuration. The tablet again however only works right on the main screen. On any other when you try to drag them, the knobs continue to rotate all the way left or right by themselves, and can’t be controlled properly.
Ok, I’m out then, sorry.
Not to step on your toes, but that’s quite a non-standard setup you have there.
Good luck sorting things out, and nice weekend ! 🙂
The first problem happens with a mouse and Rescue, try it if you get a chance.
OK, partially confirmed for both Rescue versions, however only when monitors are arranged vertically.
2 left of 1 is allright.
Yep that’s it, thanks.
This should teach both of us a lesson how hard it can be to hunt down a bug.
Interesting story !
Respect to Bootsie for all the hard work behind the scenes, too.
Good night finally,
susiwong
I’ve heard this ago just one time from a user with a vertical monitor setup. I haven’t been into it since it’s a really rare configuration ….
It should be easy to fix. Are you in control of this code or is it a bug in SynthMaker? I can correct the code if you want to email the relevant section.
BTW if you still need someone to test long startup times, I see the problem & can test (Cubase 4.51, Wavelab 6).
… interesting, if I remove the vertical monitor, both issues disapper. If I now leave your plugs open, and then change the configuration back, the plugs continue to work on any monitor.
That suggests that they do something on initialisation that confuses them – are you storing desktop dimensions when they first initialise?
thank you 😉
Awesome EQ! I just did a comparison with my hardware stereo pultec clone with a Gyraf tube output stage, Pushtec VST and Waves API 550A. Quite frankly……it sounds better than any of them! Including hardware! (it’s subjective, I know…but for my taste I prefer the flavour of Boot) The low end boost is simply the fattest I’ve heard so far, the hi-shelf is sweet, mids are….well….very brown sounding if you know what I mean. Great stuff. Warm?
And the preamp section just takes everything to another level. The best saturation to be found in software to date. And I’ve tried a lot of plugs. No nasty, farting, spiky distortion. Just a fatter tone, smoother but more chunky highs, and a more 3d sound – especiali the mids.
I just cannot say enough good words about this plugin.
THANK YOU SOOOOOOO MUCH!
Thank you for this great EQ !
I just wanted to say a big thank-you for releasing such a high-quality plug! It sounds amazing and has transformed my mixes in Reaper. I hope you set up a Paypal donation site as I would GLADLY send some funds to help you out with future developments. Thanks again!
hey bootsie. the lf freq knob does not go to default position when i press ctrl+left click
plus i just tried booteq at 96khz. seems to work ok. is it possible? or am i just halucinating 🙂