Gjalla vs Rustortion

Gjalla is a free, open-source guitar amp simulator for black metal and other raw styles. Sognevo, a one-person project making dark-music audio plugins, provides it for Windows, macOS, and Linux as VST3, CLAP, and, on macOS, AU, plus a standalone application. The processing chain includes input trim, noise gate, pedal, preamp, tone stack, power section, presence, cabinet, frost, and output trim. Its pedal offers 90s distortion, HM-2-style chainsaw, and starved-transistor fuzz voicings. Three analytic cabinets are included; WAV or AIFF impulse responses up to two seconds can be loaded, or the cabinet can be disabled for an external loader. Six factory presets, meters, editable knob values, undo and redo, tooltips, and a resizable interface are provided. Host latency is reported as six samples, stated as 0.13 ms at 48 kHz. There is no packaged release yet, so users must build from source or follow GitHub releases. A build requires Git, CMake 3.22 or later, and a C++20 compiler. Gjalla is GPLv3-or-later and has no telemetry, network access, update checks, or accounts.

Rustortion is a free guitar and bass amp simulator written in Rust for Linux and Windows. It runs standalone with JACK or inside a DAW as a VST3 or CLAP plugin. The processing chain has 12 DSP stages, including preamp, compressor, tone stack, power amp, effects, graphic EQ, and NAM model loading. Oversampling can be set from 1x through 16x, and impulse-response cabinet simulation is available for guitar and bass. Users can save and load presets, switch them with keyboard hotkeys, record in real time, tune, shift pitch with FFT processing, and use MIDI controllers. Plugin bundles are listed for Linux x86_64, Linux aarch64, and Windows x86_64. The project is MIT-licensed, experimental, and under active development, with use at the user’s own risk. Linux requires PipeWire, JACK support, and a Rust toolchain. There is no macOS build. The interface supports English and Simplified Chinese.