These are the best free stereo widening VST plugins. The VST widener plugins in this will give you a wider mix.

In this top 5, you'll find a stereo enhancer, panning plugin, tremolo, a chorus/delay, and (in my opinion) the best free stereo imaging plugin.

HY-TP2 is a free tremolo and auto-pan plugin developed by HY-Plugins and released in 2018 as an upgrade to the previous HY-TP plugin. HY-TP2 offers the basic tools needed in an auto-panner like LFO, filters, dry/wet controls, etc., over a rather simplistic interface. Sennheiser just released a free binaural panner plugin designed for mixing sound in a 3D space. This plugin is straightforward to use with a clean interface and simple controls. The idea is to place sounds within a 3D field of space without losing any quality in the overall sound, and AMBEO accomplishes this quite gracefully.

These are all quite unique and can solve different problems in your mix or achieve different goals you may be after.

Chart of the Best Free Stereo Widening Plugins

Here are the five best free stereo widening plugins that are found below the video.

Plugin Name	Available Plugin Formats	Supported OS
Ozone Imager	64-bit VST, AU, & AAX	Windows & Mac
Pancake2	32 & 64-bit VST & AU	Windows & Mac
Vocal Doubler	64-bit VST, AU, & AAX	Windows & Mac
Wider	32 & 64-bit VST, AU, & AAX	Windows & Mac
Tremolo	32 & 64-bit VST & AU	Windows & Mac

Check out this video for demos of how each one affects different samples.

1. Ozone Imager by iZotope

First up is a plugin from iZotope called Ozone Imager.

This stereo imaging plugin does more than just show you the width of your track, it also lets you shape it.

With options to control the width and a Stereoize parameter, you can bring something all the way down to mono and also make it wider than it was before.

Bottom line, this is great for understanding and controlling your mix.

2. PanCake2 by Cableguys

Free Binaural Panning Vst Free

Next is a stereo panning tool called PanCake which is made by Cableguys.

Instead of using the default panning controls that come with your DAW, this effect plugin lets you modulate the pan with an LFO and even lets you create your own modulation curves.

Basically, it makes it really easy to automate your panning.

3. Vocal Doubler by iZotope

Alright, the third plugin is another one by iZotope called Vocal Doubler.

This is a great way to Thicken a sound and to get the most out of the full stereo width.

Free Binaural Panning Vst File

I'm pretty sure it's a subtle delay or chorus effect mixed with a stereo enhancer.

iZotope does recommend using this on dry vocals, which is just vocals that don't have any effects applied to them already.

For this plugin at least, it can cause pops and clicks in the sound.

So, you would just need to make sure this is on the top of your effect rack - unless you have an EQ, it shouldn't matter for filter effects.

And yeah, just cause it's called vocal doubler, doesn't mean it can only be used on vocals.

4. Wider by Polyverse & Infected Mushroom

For the next plugin, Polyverse and Infected Mushroom teamed up and made a really cool stereo widener that always remains in-phase with itself.

This means it can even work with mono sounds, although it isn't as effective as using it on stereo sounds.

Wider is simple to use plugin and all you need to do is either drag up or down on the percentage or side to side on the meter.

5. Tremolo by PechenegFX

Last is a plugin that will rapidly pan your sound back and forth from the left and right channels.

Tremolo by PechenegFX is, of course, a tremolo effect and is good for adding some width to a sound.

You'll have to switch the mode over to pan and may need to turn the output volume up to around 1.25 to get it back to normal levels.

Now it is more like a ping-pong effect from a delay plugin but it can help make some things in your mix wider by stimulating each ear differently.

Just be cautious when using it, if you use it on too many elements and make it very pronounced or obvious, it can leave you a bit disoriented.

I hope these VST plugins help you make music or sound effects that take up a lot more of the stereo width. As always, thanks for reading!

I’ve written a Binaural Panner VST plugin using algorithms described in the previous post. I used the popular JUCE C++ library (which is a no-brainer choice for writing VST plugins these days). JUCE doesn’t offer any API for FIR filtering so i needed to write fast convolution myself and for that I used kiss_fft which is a small, but quite fast FFT library. The GUI elements (like head icon) are hard-coded as C arrays. You can choose between 3 different HRTFs from the CIPIC database. There is a lot of room for optimization, for example crossfading between previous and next impulse response could be stopped at some point, interpolation could be done doing adjacent walk…but i wrote it as an experiment (I always wanted to make my own VST plugin someday!) so it’s not meant for any serious use. In the future, I plan to dive into Ambisonics, so I’ll probably include this HRTF panner as part of the ambisonics decoder plugin…I hope to have more knowledge and experience with HRTFs by that time so I could create an average HRTF that sounds reasonable for most people and that’s when I’ll consider this plugin for serious use.
Source is available at my repo on github. Here is the screenshot: