I am looking for the following types of vst plugins (that should be available on Mac):
1. A compressor just like Renoise’s nice bus compressor with a flexible knee parameter (not just soft/hard). So a compressor with quite a “simple” amount of parameters, only with the following features more:
Mix amount: This is a neat trick toachieve a preservation of transients. Commonly it’s called “parallel compression”. Really, never believed this until I tried myself. Set up the compressor with really strong compression and then mix it 50:50 (or something) with the uncompressed signal. The result will be a good compression + natural transients
R3 bus compressor sounds very fine. Didn’t find anything such good so far. Only with 0db knee and 0ms attack, it starts to crackle. The plugin I am looking for should do not crackle in any situation
So far I tried a lot of the common modern vst devs: Fabfilter (failed for me, no knee control, attack values do not reach 0ms, that’s why kind of “brutal” sound). Voxengo - no compressor has knee control actually. A lot of older plugins which seem to be better than the new, common ones. Waves compressors, no one has actually flexible knee.
Of course some “side chain” / signal pre filter like in the signal follower would be a good thing, too.
2. A spectral eq. Where I can setup an eq curve on FFT bands. Cool would be a control to shift this curve, like “harmonic transpose” or something. I remember there were some very old plugins on windows that were capable of this. But do not remember. Didn’t find anything. Only in protoplug there is one fft eq that works and is also performant. But no controls, and it’s kind of slow if you change the curve (starts to crackle).
Very old plugins (from 2006 upwards) are fine as long as they are OSX intel compatible. Old is not always poorer. There is too much voodoo going on recent fxtheory for my taste.
If you need free
there’s the melda free plugin pack, you should like the compressor, no side chain though :c
Any linear phase EQ should fit your needs, if you’re ok to wait for a discount, there’s melda freeform eq, like other melda plugins you can set it to not crackle on render.
Hey, thanks for the suggestions! Will try thisTDR Kotelnikov, completely missed that one so far. It sen has dry-amount! Very beautiful
Melda is awesome but didn’t find any dry-amount…? Really, this “parallel compression” produces very nice results imo. Without completely complex send channel constructions for such a little reason.
I’ve been using U-He’s Presswerkand I can’t recommend it enough. As for EQ, maybe SplineEQ? It has the transpose thing and comes in a free version too.
Hey man, thanks for this incredible tip! Exactly what I am looking for. Trying it now… EDIT: Hm, what I was actually looking for is a FFT EQ, but splines are nice, too The transpose in SplineEQ doesn’t really work live, so no realtime adjustments using key follower possible.
If you need free
there’s the melda free plugin pack, you should like the compressor, no side chain though :c
Any linear phase EQ should fit your needs, if you’re ok to wait for a discount, there’s melda freeform eq, like other melda plugins you can set it to not crackle on render.
Up with the old thread!
Just discovered the free Mcompressor. Fantastic plug!
Ive got a couple of Melda plugs in the past, but ended up not using them much due to GUI clunk (both the plugins, and its effect on renoises GUI). However realise I`ve been missing out on this one. You can get some nice gating style effects or just tuck things in just right by playing with the custom knee curve. Great to have the variable RMS length control too.
One thing missing as said before is a mix control. Also would be nice to have the added soft saturation from their EQ aswell, but no big deal to add the EQ before or after just for that.
