Free doesn't mean simple: the engineering behind ODDDIST
Oversampling, denormal handling, real-time-safe allocation, true bypass: none of it is exclusive to paid plugins. It's just work most people never see, whether they paid for it or not.
Aliasing is the tax on nonlinearity
Any nonlinear stage, distortion included, generates harmonics that were not in the original signal. Some of those harmonics land above half the sample rate, and without headroom to catch them, they fold back down into frequencies that were never meant to be there — audible as a harsh, faintly metallic edge that has nothing to do with the character you were trying to add.
ODDDIST's drive stage runs at four times the session's sample rate internally, through a two-stage half-band polyphase IIR filter, specifically to give those harmonics room to exist before they get folded back down. It costs a small, fixed amount of latency, reported to the host at all times — in both Off and React — so switching modes mid-session never triggers a latency renegotiation.
The parts you're not supposed to notice
Nothing is allocated on the audio thread. Every buffer ODDDIST needs is reserved once, when the plugin is prepared, not while it is processing — allocating memory in the middle of a real-time callback is one of the more reliable ways to produce a dropout that only shows up on somebody else's machine, at a moment nobody can reproduce.
Parameters ramp instead of jumping, so automation and fast knob moves don't produce the small clicks that come from a value changing between one sample and the next. The signal path is also denormal-safe, which matters specifically on long, quiet tails and fade-outs, where denormal numbers can quietly spike CPU usage on some processors for no audible reason.
None of this is glamorous. It's also the difference between a plugin that behaves the same on every machine and one that occasionally, mysteriously, doesn't.
Off means off, not quiet
Covered from the other angle in an earlier post: ODD ENGINE's Off mode is a true bypass of the adaptive path, not the same code running with the effect turned down. Static saturation only, with zero additional CPU cost for the analysis it isn't doing.
Why any of this is free
Oversampling, denormal handling and real-time-safe allocation are baseline expectations for anything meant to sit in a real session, not premium features held back for a paid tier. ODDDIST being free was a decision about the business, not an excuse to cut corners on the parts nobody sees.