The short answer
They are not the same kind of tool, which is why every “best saturation plugins” list that ranks them against each other is answering the wrong question. Decapitator is one saturation stage with a tone stack wrapped around it: every control on the panel exists to decide what gets driven and how hot. RC-20 Retro Color is six independent modules under one slider, and only one of them is distortion at all. Decapitator adds heat. RC-20 adds history. If your mix is thin, buy the $199 one. If your mix is sterile, buy the $99 one. The overlap between them is about fifteen percent, and that fifteen percent is the only place the comparison is even real.
Search for either of these and you land in the same list. MusicRadar’s saturation roundup carries both. Production Music Live’s carries both. Half a dozen “7 best harmonic exciters” posts carry both — our own saturation roundup included, which is part of why this page exists — usually two slots apart, scored as though a producer standing in front of them is choosing between two flavours of the same thing. The forums know better — scroll far enough into any Gearspace thread and someone writes “RC-20 for movement” almost as an aside, which is the whole answer, dropped in passing, by a person who has owned both for a decade. Nobody has written it down properly.
So this comparison doesn’t open with a feature table, because a feature table is what created the confusion — and because what saturation actually is is the question those tables assume you have already answered. It opens with signal flow: where, physically, the distortion sits in each plug-in, and what is standing in front of it and behind it. That one question separates them completely, and once you see it you can’t unsee it. Every price, version string and control below was re-verified against the vendors on 16 July 2026 — not against aggregators, which currently list Decapitator “from $194” and RC-20 “from $58.80” while the actual storefronts say $199 and $99.
We may earn a commission if you buy through links on this page. It never changes a score. Both of these plug-ins get marked down hard and often — the honest advice on either is to wait for a sale, which is advice that costs us money.
Where the drive sits
Open Decapitator and you are looking at a single signal path with one saturation circuit in the middle of it. That is not a simplification — it is the architecture, and the manual is explicit about the order. Tone and Low Cut act before the saturation stage. Thump adds a few dB at the Low Cut corner, also before. The audio then hits whichever of the five modelled circuits you’ve selected, driven by the Drive knob and, if you’ve committed to the bit, an extra twenty decibels from the Punish button. Only after all that does High Cut get to work, at either a gentle 6 dB per octave or a steep 30.
Read that order again, because it is the entire design philosophy. The tone controls are not there to shape the output. They are there to shape the input — to decide which frequencies get to meet the distortion. Turn Tone toward dark and you are not making the result darker; you are feeding the circuit more low end and letting it generate a different set of harmonics from a different part of the spectrum. The manual says so in as many words: the Tone knob alters the sound before the saturation section, so it affects which frequencies get distorted, and can have a dramatic effect on the sound. High Cut sits at the end for one reason, which is to tame the fizz that the drive just created. It is a mop, not a paintbrush — and if that ordering is new to you, the mechanics of using saturation are worth an hour before you spend $199.
Now open RC-20. There is no single path with a stage in the middle. There are six modules — Noise, Wobble, Distort, Digital, Space, Magnetic — each of which can be switched in or out independently, each with its own type selector and its own amount. Above them sits the Magnitude slider, which scales all six at once. Exactly one of those six, Distort, generates harmonics. The other five generate noise, pitch instability, sample-rate and bit-depth reduction, reverb, and volume dropouts respectively. Five sixths of RC-20 is not saturation. It is damage.
This is why the roundups mislead. They file both under saturation because both have a distortion control, in the same way you could file a scalpel and a Swiss Army knife under “blades.” The categorisation is technically defensible and practically useless. One of these products is a specialist that does a single thing with five accents. The other is a generalist whose distortion module is the fifth-most-interesting thing about it.
What Decapitator actually adds
The five styles are not presets. They are five separate models, each derived from a specific piece of hardware sitting in Soundtoys’ lab in Burlington, Vermont, and the manual names every one. A is the Ampex 350 tape-drive preamp — the machine that ran at Sun, Stax, Motown and Chess, described by its own modellers as ultra-ultra-smooth. E is the Chandler/EMI TG Channel: beefy lows, airy top. N is the Neve 1057, which matters because it is early Neve built around germanium transistors rather than the silicon of the ubiquitous 1073 — think Fuzz Face, not console channel. T and P are both the Thermionic Culture Vulture, the first studio distortion box that wasn’t just for guitarists, captured at two different tube settings.
T and P are the pair worth understanding, because they are the same hardware and they sound nothing alike, and the reason is textbook tube behaviour that the manual states outright. The triode setting adds predominantly even-order harmonics. The pentode setting adds predominantly odd. Even orders are octaves and fifths of the fundamental — consonant intervals, which is why even-order distortion reads to the ear as warmth and weight rather than as dirt. Odd orders are the ones that sit at intervals your ear hears as tension. That is why T flatters a snare and P makes a synth lead nasty, and why choosing between them is a musical decision rather than a taste one.
A note on that figure, because it matters more than the figure does. We do not own a licence for either plug-in and we did not measure them, so there is no frequency response chart on this page and there will not be one. What Soundtoys publishes is which harmonic orders characterise each mode. What nobody publishes is how loud each order is at a given drive setting. So the ladder above marks presence and absence at equal heights and carries no amplitude axis, because we have no amplitude data. Any site showing you a smooth harmonic curve for Decapitator’s T mode either owns an audio analyser and a licence, or drew it. Ask which.
The practical consequence of the five-model design is that Decapitator fails in one specific way: it only ever gives you harmonics. Every problem you bring to it gets the same answer with a different accent. When the answer is right — the snare is limp, the bass has no upper structure, the vocal disappears at low volume on a phone — it is right very fast, and that speed is most of what you’re paying for. When the answer is wrong, no amount of style-switching helps, because the problem was never a shortage of harmonics.
What RC-20 actually adds
RC-20’s Distort module is a competent saturator. It is not five modelled circuits from a Vermont hardware collection, and XLN doesn’t claim it is — the vendor copy says “everything from mild saturation to raging fuzz” and leaves it there. Used on its own, against Decapitator on its own, Decapitator wins, and it is not close. If that were the whole story RC-20 would be a worse Decapitator for half the money and this article would end here.
It isn’t the story, because the other five modules are doing something Decapitator structurally cannot. Noise adds vinyl crackle, tape hiss, room tone, circuit hum, stompbox static. Wobble introduces pitch instability — the drift of a belt that has stretched, the flutter of a capstan that isn’t quite round. Digital crushes bit depth and sample rate, the specific ugliness of a 1988 sampler. Space is a reverb. Magnetic reproduces volume drops: the wear and tear of tape that has been played too many times.
Put those together and you are not adding harmonics at all. You are adding evidence of a journey. A recording that has crackle and drift and dropouts is a recording that has been somewhere — pressed to a disc, played on a deck, dubbed to a cassette, left in a car in August — the sound lo-fi hip-hop is built on. That is a completely different claim from “this signal passed through a hot preamp,” and no amount of drive on a Decapitator will ever make it, because a preamp doesn’t wobble. Pitch instability is not a harmonic phenomenon. It cannot be reached from where Decapitator stands.
The Magnitude slider is the part people underrate and the reason RC-20 keeps its slot on busy sessions. One control scales every active module at once, which turns a static colour into a gesture. Ride it up across the last bar of a verse and the whole track degrades on cue; drop it to zero on the downbeat and the chorus arrives clean. That is an arrangement move, performed with a fader, and Decapitator has no equivalent because it has nothing to scale — its Drive knob just gets louder and more distorted, which is not the same thing at all.
What they cost, and what the price tags hide
Vendor-direct on 16 July 2026: Decapitator is $199, RC-20 Retro Color is $99. Both numbers are, in practice, fiction, and in opposite directions.
Decapitator’s $199 is a number almost nobody pays, because the plug-in is a permanent resident of every sale Soundtoys runs, and because the Soundtoys 5 bundle — twenty-three plug-ins including EchoBoy, Little AlterBoy, SuperPlate and Effect Rack — is $599. Three individual plug-ins at $199, $199 and $149 already put you at $547, so if Decapitator is your second Soundtoys purchase the bundle maths has already started arguing with you. There is an Academic bundle at $299 if you or someone in your household is a student or educator, which is the single largest legitimate discount in this comparison and the one most people never check.
RC-20’s $99 is closer to real, and XLN publishes something Soundtoys doesn’t: an official Rent-to-Own ladder at $4.99 a month for twenty months, pausable at any time. That totals $99.80 — eighty cents over the outright price, which is close to the most honest instalment plan in the plug-in business. There is also a 10-day trial with full functionality, no feature gating.
What both price tags hide is the sale floor, and here we are going to decline to print a number. RC-20 has been down near $19 in flash sales; Decapitator ran at $59 in September 2025. Those are historical facts about expired promotions, not prices, and quoting them as though they’re available is how buying guides waste your afternoon. The useful version of that information is structural: neither of these ever needs to be bought at list. Both vendors discount several times a year. If you are reading this and it is not a sale week, the correct action is to install RC-20’s free trial, and let Decapitator wait.
The decade question
Here is the thing the roundups will not tell you about the $199 plug-in: read the Soundtoys release log end to end, all the way back to 2015, and count the DSP features added to Decapitator. The answer is zero. Every entry mentioning it by name is maintenance — a session-recall bug in 2015, an undo-history flood in Ableton in 2020, an AudioSuite stem-format fix in 2018, a preset level adjusted. The user guide on the product page is still the Version 5 guide, copyright 2015. Decapitator’s current version reads 5.5, but that is the Soundtoys platform version, shared across all twenty-three plug-ins; the most recent update, 5.5.5 on 7 July 2026, fixed a PanMan stereo dropout and an EchoBoy pattern bug. Neither is Decapitator.
That cuts both ways and you should hold both halves. The uncharitable read is that $199 buys a 2009 algorithm with a 2026 installer. The charitable read — and the one the evidence better supports — is that the algorithm was finished, and Soundtoys has spent a decade doing the unglamorous work of keeping it running: Apple Silicon in 2022, VST3 in 2022, macOS releases tracked as they landed, a resizable UI in 5.5.2. A plug-in from 2009 that loads on a 2026 Mac without an emulation layer represents real, sustained engineering that simply doesn’t show up as a feature bullet. Stability is a feature; it is just an invisible one.
RC-20 sits at version 1.5.1, released 14 January 2026, fixing automation behaviour in AU and AAX. Version 1.5.0, in October 2025, added artist presets and preset-browser keyboard navigation. So RC-20 is also being maintained, also mostly cosmetically, and its last substantive DSP work is likewise years behind it. Neither of these plug-ins is under active development in any meaningful sense. Both are finished products in maintenance, and both vendors are honest enough not to pretend otherwise. Judge them on what they do today, because that is what they will do in 2030.
Where each one earns its slot
Decapitator earns its insert on individual sources with a specific deficiency — our full Decapitator review goes through the styles one by one. A kick that thuds but doesn’t knock: drive it in A or T until the beater comes back. A bassline that vanishes on laptop speakers: the fundamental isn’t reaching them, and no EQ can boost a frequency the driver cannot reproduce, but the harmonics Decapitator generates at 200 Hz and 400 Hz will be reproduced, and your ear reconstructs the missing root from them. That is the single most valuable thing this plug-in does, and it is a genuine psychoacoustic trick, not a vibe.
Vocals are where the Mix knob stops being a convenience and becomes the point. Saturation flattens transients — that is what it is for — but a vocal with flattened consonants is a vocal that has lost its diction. Drive hard, then pull Mix back to somewhere between 30 and 50 percent, and the dry path restores the consonant attack while the wet path keeps the weight. You have just done parallel processing without a send, a return, a bus or any latency argument, which is exactly why this plug-in has stayed on professional sessions for seventeen years while flashier saturators have come and gone.
RC-20 earns its slot somewhere else entirely — on things that are too new; the full RC-20 review covers each module in turn. A software piano that sounds like a software piano. A drum loop rendered at 96 kHz that sits on top of a sampled break instead of beside it. A synth pad with no noise floor, which is a thing that has never existed in the physical world — every real recording ever made has a noise floor, and its absence is a tell your ear clocks before your brain does. RC-20’s Noise module is not a gimmick. It is supplying an artefact whose absence was the problem.
It also earns its slot on transitions, which is the use nobody writes about and everyone does. Automate Magnitude from zero to sixty across the last two bars of a bridge and you get a build that costs one fader move. This is why RC-20 shows up in so many lo-fi, jungle, liquid drum-and-bass and synthwave sessions — not because those genres need saturation, but because those genres need the sense that the audio has a history, and RC-20 manufactures history faster than anything else at the price.
The fifteen percent where they genuinely compete
There is one real contest, and it is narrow: a clean digital source that needs to sound like it came off a record. Drums, most often. A rap loop. A house stab. It is the exact problem recreating a lo-fi hip-hop record runs into on the first bar. Both plug-ins can get you there and they get you there by different roads, which makes this the only comparison on the page where a direct A/B is meaningful.
Decapitator gets there by driving the source until the harmonic structure resembles something that went through a console. It will sound like it was recorded well onto analogue. RC-20 gets there by adding noise, wobble and a little dropout until the source resembles something that was played back off a medium. It will sound like it was copied badly off analogue. Both are “analogue,” and they are opposite claims: one is the front of the chain, the other is the far end of it, years later.
Which means that in the overlap they are complements more than rivals, and the professional answer — Decapitator first, into RC-20 — is chain order, not a purchase decision. Drive the source, then age the result. Reverse it and you are driving the noise you just added, which turns hiss into fizz and is almost never what you wanted. If you own both, that order is the tip. If you own neither and can only buy one, the overlap is not where your decision lives, because the overlap is fifteen percent of what either plug-in is for.
Where the rest of the field sits
Neither of these is the flexible option, and it is worth naming what is. FabFilter’s Saturn 2 is the multiband, modulated, deeply editable saturation lab — if your objection to Decapitator is “I want to drive only the 2 kHz band while an envelope follower rides the drive,” Saturn is the plug-in you actually want, and it is the honest recommendation to make against both of these. If what you actually want is tape rather than a preamp, the tape saturation field is a different shelf entirely. Soundtoys’ own Radiator ($99) is the cheaper way into the same family’s tube colour, and Little Radiator, included in the bundle, is cheaper still.
Against RC-20 the field is thicker than the marketing suggests, because RC-20’s success spawned a genre: Baby Audio, Klevgrand’s DAW Cassette, iZotope’s free Vinyl, and a long tail of lo-fi multi-effects that do a subset of the six modules for a fraction of the price. iZotope Vinyl costs nothing and covers a real portion of the Noise and Wobble use case. If your entire requirement is “make this piano sound like a record,” try the free one for an evening before spending $99 — and if you find yourself fighting it after a week, that is exactly what the $99 buys you.
Copy protection, and what it costs you in five years
This never appears in a saturation roundup and it should, because it is the difference between a plug-in that opens your 2019 session and one that shows you a dialog box. Soundtoys is built on PACE. Historically that meant an iLok account was mandatory for everything, trials included, and dealers still say so on their product pages. Since version 5.3.0 in November 2018, Soundtoys has issued Activation Codes for new products bought direct from its own web store, which activate without an iLok account — but that carve-out is explicitly for new purchases, not upgrades, so buying Decapitator through a reseller or trading up from an older licence can still land you in iLok License Manager. The installer has shipped with iLok License Manager bundled since 5.3.2. You do not need a physical dongle; you do need to think about it.
RC-20 asks for an internet connection during installation and nothing else. There is no third-party licence manager, no dongle, no cloud session to keep alive, and no separate account with a company you have never otherwise dealt with. XLN’s own online installer handles it. For a producer who works on one machine that is a distinction without a difference; for anyone who moves between a studio rig and a laptop on a train with no signal, it is the entire ballgame, and it quietly favours the cheaper plug-in.
The reason this matters more than it seems is time. Both of these are finished products, which means the version you buy is roughly the version you will be running in 2032, and the thing most likely to break your session is not the DSP — it is the authorisation layer in front of it. Soundtoys has a good record here: the release log shows PACE and GarageBand/Logic compatibility issues getting fixed, iLok blacklisting in Cubase on Windows solved by bundling a newer manager, activation reworked to be less hostile. That is a company doing the work. It is still one more moving part than XLN ships, and one more company whose future you are betting on.
None of which flips the verdict — it is worth a few tenths on platform health, not a rewrite. But if you have ever lost an afternoon to a licence manager, you already know which way this section pushes you, and you are not wrong to weight it.
The verdict, scored
Six axes, unweighted mean, decimals defended below. Unweighted is a deliberate choice and you should override it: if you only care about harmonic quality, read the first row and stop, because that row is the one with the widest gap on the page.
| Axis | Decapitator | RC-20 Retro Color |
|---|---|---|
| Harmonic character | 9.1 | 8.2 |
| Breadth of job | 6.8 | 9.0 |
| Speed to a usable result | 8.9 | 8.6 |
| Control depth | 8.4 | 7.6 |
| Value at list price | 6.9 | 8.8 |
| Platform health | 8.2 | 7.8 |
| Overall | 8.1 | 8.3 |
Harmonic character — 9.1 vs 8.2. The widest gap here, and the only axis where the difference is in kind rather than degree. Decapitator’s five styles are individually modelled from named hardware and they behave differently under drive rather than just sounding different at rest; the T/P pair alone gives you a documented even-versus-odd choice that most saturators don’t expose at all. It loses 0.9 off a perfect score because it is single-band and because “analogue character” is exactly one flavour of character. RC-20’s 8.2 is not a criticism — its Distort module is genuinely good — but it is one module doing one job with generic type selectors, and against five modelled circuits that is a real 0.9.
Breadth of job — 6.8 vs 9.0. The inverse gap, and it is the largest on the board. RC-20 does six things, five of which Decapitator cannot do at any setting, and pitch instability in particular is unreachable from a saturation topology. Decapitator’s 6.8 is an honest low score for a product that is deliberately narrow: it is not trying to be broad, and the score reflects what it is, not a failure to be something else. RC-20 stops short of a 9-plus because its reverb is ordinary and its bitcrusher is beaten by dedicated tools.
Speed to a usable result — 8.9 vs 8.6. Closest axis on the page. Decapitator edges it because a good result is genuinely three moves — pick a style, turn Drive, pull Mix — and because Auto-gain removes the loudness illusion that makes everyone think distortion improved their mix when it just got louder. RC-20’s presets are strong and its Magnitude slider means one control gets you 80 percent there, but six modules is six decisions and the honest gap is 0.3, not zero.
Control depth — 8.4 vs 7.6. Decapitator wins on the routing nobody notices: Tone and Low Cut pre-saturation, High Cut post, Steep switching the slope from 6 to 30 dB per octave, Mix for parallel. That is a lot of shaping for a plug-in with one job. RC-20 has more controls in total but they are shallower — per-module amount and type, with limited routing between them and no ability to reorder the chain.
Value at list — 6.9 vs 8.8. This axis is why RC-20 takes the overall. $199 for a single-band saturator with a decade of no feature work is a genuinely hard sell at list, and the 6.9 is meant to sting. $99 for six modules plus a published, pausable instalment plan that totals eighty cents over outright is close to best-in-class. Both scores move if you buy on sale, which you should; neither vendor should be paid list.
Platform health — 8.2 vs 7.8. Both are finished products in maintenance. Soundtoys edges it on a longer, better-documented record of tracking OS and format changes — Apple Silicon, VST3, a public release log going back a decade — and shipped 5.5.5 nine days before this was written. XLN is responsive but quieter, and RC-20’s last touch was a January automation fix.
Overall: RC-20 8.3, Decapitator 8.1. RC-20 wins the arithmetic on breadth and price, and that is the right answer for most people buying one plug-in with their own money. It is also a soft win and you should treat it as one: on the single axis that most people are actually shopping for — the sound of harmonics — Decapitator wins by 0.9, and 0.9 is a chasm. The scorecard says RC-20. The correct purchase says whichever of your two problems is real.
Who should buy which
| If you are… | Buy | Because |
|---|---|---|
| Mixing rock, pop or hip-hop and things sound polite | Decapitator | Your problem is a shortage of harmonics, and this is the fastest route to them that exists at any price. |
| Making lo-fi, chillwave, jungle or synthwave | RC-20 | Your problem is that the audio has no past. Five of RC-20’s six modules manufacture one; Decapitator has none of them. |
| Buying your first colour plug-in, on a budget | RC-20 | $99 covers more ground, the trial is 10 days with nothing gated, and the rent-to-own totals $99.80. |
| Already inside the Soundtoys ecosystem | Decapitator | Check the $599 bundle before the $199 single — three plug-ins already put you at $547. |
| A student or educator | Decapitator | The $299 Academic bundle is the largest legitimate discount in this comparison and almost nobody checks it. |
| Wanting to drive one frequency band, modulated | Neither | That is Saturn 2’s job. Both plug-ins here are broadband by design and will fight you. |
Three tests before you spend anything
All three run inside the free trials — Soundtoys offers 30 days, XLN offers 10 with full functionality. Do them on your own material, not on a demo loop chosen by a vendor.
- Put Decapitator on a snare, style A, Drive around 5. It will sound better. Everything sounds better louder.
- Engage Auto so the output compensates for the drive gain, and listen again.
- If it still sounds better, the saturation helped. If the improvement evaporated, you were hearing volume — the most expensive lesson in mixing, learned here for free.
- Repeat with RC-20’s Distort module and its output trim. Same test, same verdict.
- Take a clean software piano. Give yourself ten minutes with Decapitator and try to make it sound like it was played back off a worn cassette.
- You cannot. You can make it sound driven, but not unstable — pitch instability is not a harmonic phenomenon and no style or drive setting reaches it.
- Now do it in RC-20 with Wobble and Magnetic. Forty seconds.
- That is the whole article in one exercise, and it is why the roundups are wrong.
- On a clean break, run Decapitator into RC-20 and print it. Reverse the order and print again.
- Null the two prints against each other. They will not cancel, and the reversed chain will be noticeably fizzier — RC-20’s noise floor is now being driven by Decapitator’s saturation stage, and hiss with harmonics on it is just fizz.
- Now hold the chain order and swap only the style: T into identical RC-20 settings, then P. Note how P’s odd harmonics interact with the crackle very differently from T’s even ones.
- Keep the print you prefer and write down which style it was. That note is worth more than this article.
Buying Decapitator to fix a lo-fi problem, or RC-20 to fix a weight problem, then concluding the plug-in is overrated. Both conclusions are correct and both are about the wrong plug-in. Diagnose first: is the source thin, or is it too new? Those are different faults with different tools, and no amount of drive fixes the second one.
Frequently asked questions
Is Decapitator worth $199 in 2026?
At list, for most people, no — and the score above reflects that. It is a single-band saturator whose algorithm has had no feature work in over a decade. On sale, or as part of the $599 Soundtoys 5 bundle if you want two or more of the twenty-three plug-ins, or via the $299 Academic bundle if you qualify, it is straightforwardly worth it. Nothing gets you to musical analogue harmonics faster.
What do Decapitator’s five styles actually model?
Per the user guide: A is the Ampex 350 tape-drive preamp, E is the Chandler/EMI TG Channel, N is the Neve 1057 input channel (germanium transistors, not the later 1073’s silicon), T is the Thermionic Culture Vulture on its triode setting, and P is the same unit on pentode. Soundtoys states that triodes add predominantly even harmonics and pentodes predominantly odd, which is why T and P sound so different despite being the same box.
What does the Punish button do?
It adds 20 dB of gain into the saturation stage. That is the whole mechanism — it is not a different circuit or a hidden algorithm, just a large fixed boost that pushes whichever style you have selected far past where it was designed to sit. Output will jump accordingly, so use Auto or pull the Output knob down.
Can RC-20 replace Decapitator?
For the specific job of adding analogue harmonic weight, no. RC-20’s Distort is one competent module against five individually modelled circuits, and it is beaten in a direct A/B. For the broader job of making digital audio sound like it has been somewhere, RC-20 does five things Decapitator cannot do at any setting.
Can Decapitator replace RC-20?
No, and not by a small margin. Decapitator cannot produce pitch instability, noise, bit-rate reduction, reverb or volume dropouts. It is a saturation topology, and those artefacts are not reachable from it. If you want wobble, no amount of drive will get you there.
Which order should I run them in if I own both?
Decapitator first, RC-20 second: drive the source, then age the result. Reversed, Decapitator saturates the noise floor RC-20 just added, which turns hiss into fizz. The exception is deliberate — if you specifically want that fizz as an effect, reverse it on purpose.
What version is each plug-in on right now?
Decapitator reports 5.5, which is the shared Soundtoys platform version rather than a Decapitator-specific one; the platform’s most recent update is 5.5.5, released 7 July 2026. RC-20 Retro Color is on 1.5.1, released 14 January 2026. Both figures were checked against the vendors’ own release logs on 16 July 2026.
Is there a free alternative to either?
Partially, for RC-20: iZotope Vinyl is free and covers some of the Noise and Wobble ground, and most DAWs ship a saturator — Ableton’s Saturator is capable, just with fewer colours than Decapitator. There is no free plug-in that models five named pieces of hardware, and there is nothing free that matches RC-20’s six-module breadth under one slider.