GNUitar

GNUitar is a lightweight Windows application that can be used for applying real-time guitar sound effects, such as tremolo, vibrato, reverb, and echo.

The program offers support for two playback modes: via MME API or DirectSound (this one needs DirectX to be installed on the target computer).

The tool does not impress much in the visual department because the layout looks outdated. You can make use of tooltips for viewing short descriptions about the program’s configuration parameters each time you hover your mouse cursor over a specific function.

GNUitar gives you the possibility to enable different special effects, such as auto-wah, distort, delay, reverb, vibrato, chorus, echo, phasor, tremolo, sustain, and noise gate. Each of the aforementioned effects comes with its own set of parameters for fine-tuning the sound.

The tool allows you to build up a list with the effects that you want to make them active, start or stop the process, add preset files from your computer, as well as save output file to WAV file format.

A few configuration settings are implemented for helping you perform several audio tweaks, namely adjust the sampling rate, number of channels, fragment size, and number of bits, overrun a custom threshold, and output audio streams via DirectSound.

Tests have shown that the application eats up CPU and memory resources so the overall performance of the computer may be hampered.

All things considered, GNUitar comes packed with several handy audio effects. However, the GUI requires a facelift to make it easier for you to activate the special effects. The tool has not been updated for a long time so it may cause compatibility issues on newer operating systems like Windows 8.1 Pro.