Bitcrusher

Any great ones asides from the stock Cakewalk one?

Bit Crushers are not reall my thing, but you could do a lot worse than D16's Decimort

my favorite (old, but still relevant) is the 3lit3 r3duc3r (or elite reducer). it just sounds the best to me and has lots of simple automatable parameters.
drums sound delicious through it.
http://www.virtualcreations.de/download/elitereducer126.zip
http://www.virtualcreatio...load/elitereducer2.zip

download links aren't working right now for some reason?

You must not link directly to the binary on virtualcreations audioplugins webpage. Better is www.virtualcreations.de
 
There is also a new version of Elite Reducer 2 (version 2.1) for Mac OSX and Windows available now.

I caught bitflipper in flagrante delicto:
bitflipper is a bitcrasher!

bitflipper
"Great bitcrusher" is an oxymoron in my world 
 
A bitcrusher works by truncating data to some user-specified word length. That's it. There aren't a lot of possibilities for adding flavor and features to such a simple process beyond letting you specify the word length and applying before/and-or/after filters.
 

This ^.
 

As mentioned above, D16's Decimort has about every knob and button you can imagine tacking on to a bitcrusher.

Most of which are apparently for the type of filter you mentioned plus downsampling rather than the actual bit reduction part.

I'll admit to having crushed a few bits when I was young and foolish. But I quickly realized the error of my ways and adopted this guiding principle: 16 bits or more in all things.
 
I just happen to have Decimort here (got it in a group buy a couple years ago that included all their effects) but I hadn't ever used it so I just now loaded it up to have a look.
 
For all the knobs on it, the functionality is simple. It lets you select both word length (down to 1 bit!) and sample rate (down to 44Hz, with optional anti-aliasing filter), and it has a single filter (of selectable type) that can be placed before or after the decimator. There's a wet/dry mix control plus input and output level controls.
 
So I couldn't resist trying the buggar out for grins. When used in moderation, it gives an effect reminiscent of singing through Atlas horns at the racetrack (we've all done that, right?). Not entirely unpleasant.