Gjalla vs TONEX

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.

TONEX has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.