This is my revised review of Afrocongo Lite and VoxPlug. I ran into several issues. Afroplug support contacted me right away and were very helpful – they will fix many of the issues. The biggest problem I had was the plugins flat out would not load in my DAW. Because Support was so good, I gave it another shot. Several hours later I found the plugins worked fine in Vsthost, Mixcraft Recording Studio 9 and Bitwig 8 Track. Waveform 12.5 was the problem and the upgrade to 13 didn\’t fix it. I found that if I drag the plugins into Waveform’s plugin list, all is good. If I rely on Waveform’s normal scanning process, not so good. I had another non-functioning plugin, dragged it into the plugin list, and it works now. Never tried dragging any plugins in before, learned a good workaround.

So are the plugins good? Yes. Many interesting and fun sounds. I’ve had a blast trying them out on a few tracks. The controls in the plugins let you vary the sounds to fit your needs – filters, echo, reverb and more. Sound quality is good in a mix, file size is good. CPU usage is also good: In one track with 9 plugins working from a short MIDI clip, Waveform is using 5-10% of my PC’s CPU. VoxPlug used about 10% of that 5-10% (so .5 to 1% of the CPU, compared to my CA2600 synth at 40% and Vaults at 21% of Waveform’s total. Afrocongo was down in the 4-5% range. No added latency from either plugin. So very little impact. For reference, I’m running under Windows 11 Pro, 32 GB memory, core i9-13900 CPU.

I prefer to put sound files and samples on a drive other than my SSD system drive, and these plugins don’t allow that. But it looks like the files stored C:\\ProgramData\\Afroplug are very small, under 100K total, so not a big deal.