Linda Audio releases Sonicrusher, a freeware compressor plugin for Windows.
You can never have too many compressors, right? Luckily Linda Audio has you covered with today’s release of Sonicrusher. Sonicrusher is a fully featured freeware compressor and has a lot of interesting features you might expect to find in a paid plugin.
Sonicrusher is certainly capable of transparent and clean compression and does so deftly. The extra features present elevate it, however, beyond just the typical dynamics processors you might find in your DAW.
There are two detectors on offer labeled vintage and modern. Vintage operates in feedback mode, which is a gentler compression action overall. It works well on instrument groups and can certainly do the job on drums if desired. Modern is feedforward and is much faster and harder on transients than feedback. This excels on drums or anything with very sharp and noticeable transients.
There is a variable knee, and the RMS detector is fully adjustable. There are two sidechain filters, one low pass, and the other high pass. Sonicrusher is somewhat reminiscent of the mid-range thrust of the API 2500 and can certainly pump some life into guitars and synths. The sidechain can also receive a key, but it is certainly handy to sculpt out which frequencies are affected.
Crush is a super interesting inclusion and acts as a distortion following a bandpass. The center point of the filter gets distorted. The added harmonics are pleasing and can get quite gnarly with a little push. If you typically run saturation or distortion following a compressor, this feature could potentially simplify your workflow.
Rounding out the feature set is a clipper. The clipper does have an additional threshold control, so you can trim off peaks without pushing the output. All adjustments can be automatically gain compensated, which is always a welcome addition for any processor affecting volume and density.
If you like vintage-style compressor plugins, check out our free BPB Dirty LA plugin.
Sonicrusher is a free download and sadly appears to be Windows only at the time of this writing. Supported plugin formats are VST2 and VST3, and there is compatibility for 32-bit and 64-bit hosts.
Download: Sonicrusher
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12 Comments
Tomislav Zlatic
onThanks to BPB readers Jon B and Christian H for the info!
MRG
onAnother one? Srsly? :P Ah well, I’ll give it a go only because it seems to be fully featured and that might prove to be handy at times.
Being not a fan of the skeuomorphic genre, especially the 1U 19″ rack constraint, so grain of salt and all that. But there’s way too much different styles of knobs. Looks messy to me. Some weird alignments of text/knobs, the modern/vintage switch is a perfect example of that. I’m sure there’s room for improvement there without going out of the original idea, if you -really- insist on keeping it. >:)
Sometimes I wish -everything- was skinable… ^_^;
Jiri aka Rivermint
onYou got free plugin with instant download and still complaining? Sad
MRG
onLet me introduce you to the concept of ‘constructive criticism’. A way to help people consider different choices, or not. I do believe that sometimes, users are put off by the ‘User eXperience’, another concept I came up with on my own recently, apparently, -especially- in the freeware world. If you’d been around forums for a long time, you’d see many people with poor eyesight giving up using some softwares only because of GUIs. Now that’s sad.
A generally good example of what to do in the skeuomorphic is Analog Obsession, there’s clear contrast between the panel, the knobs and the highlight of the knobs.
You got free insight from a freeware lover who only wants things to be better, for the maximum of users? Sad.
I’m thinking of introducing the concepts of ‘sarcasm’ and ‘tongue-in-cheek’, but I’m not sure people are ready for it yet… ;-)
Martin Linda
onHi, thank you for constructive hints:) I agree that gui could be more polished fof sure. But I do this all by myself and I am programmer, musician and mixing engineer but not an artist or ux designer. I wanted to release this plugin commercially in cooperation with some bigger company at first (as I did with my previous plugins Linda RockStack and Linda Ironverb), but I found no interest anywhere for just to try another compressor. Despite that I believe that sonically and feature-wise this is very good tool even on par with best commercial software compressors and I use it regullary with success in my production. So at the end I decided to release Sonicrusher with this gui for free with option to donate for its future development (there is a paypal link at my blog) I hope its qualities at least could make my brand known and hopefully it help me to gain some resources to buy a good ui designer. And I have some ideas which would make it even better. So, anyway thank you for you interest and I will be glad for any next criticism or any other openion, because feedback is now the most valuable thing for me:)
MRG
onHi Martin! Don’t worry, you have nothing to feel bad for, and in the end it’s your baby, so any decision is yours alone. Feedback is indeed most important, in another life I dabbled in programming (nothing audio/DSP related, unfortunately) and have/had friends in the game.
The compressor output, both commercial and free, has been thriving in the last few months (hence my “Another one? Srsly?” joke, part of a running gag I entertain in the comment section of BPB). I’ve always been grateful to freeware releases, my only interest is to help, albeit modestly, to promote them and sometimes make them better. I only want people to have access to great tools and not only in the audio world.
Had the opportunity to test it since, so I can now say… I like it! There’s still lots to experiment with, but my interest was piqued by the Crush and Clip sections, because while I’m still learning how to best use compressors, I looove distortion effects. And they’re very interesting in themselves, and great in a compressor chain. So, for a v1.0.0, it’s a definitive win from me!
As for GUI, which is always all in the eye of the beholder, I made it clear that I’m not a skeuo-fanboy, but with better contrast and perhaps a more unified knob style I might like it even better? Hey my eyes aren’t getting younger, you know… ;D Do what you think is best, always.
Seasons greetings, best of luck, and thank you for Sonicrusher.
mrg, tongue-in-cheek mild-criticizing freeware-loving crappy-composing random dude on teh interweb.
PS: Before I forget, perhaps a Dynamic II level for the Autogain section with a shorter RMS windows? (oh my, i’m complaining again, I can’t stop myself, bad, bad mrg, tsk tsk)
tl;dr: YAY! \o/
Martin Linda
onOk, I understand and thank you:) Regarding Dynamic II – I think the RMS size for dynamic autogain compensation could be a variable parameter – that would allow to use it even as second RMS compression with its shorter settings and maybe it would have some interesting use/results.
Joel
onNo AU version?
Martin Linda
onHi, I hope I will be able to make AU (and VST for Mac) version soon.
DEN VENN
onThank You, Martin Linda for this beautiful compressor! For people like me who have no income with commercial musicproduction it’s essential to have pluginsproducer like Linda, Analog Obsession et al.
I use also softube, Brainworx,Cherry Audio and Arturia. Good stuff and sometimes expensive. Whne spotify and Co. are wanting to donate me customers I will be able to pay a small gift to non-commercials like You and will do it.
Your Comp reminds me a little on a silver comp from Focusrite, beautify with its bassexpander. The best is Your cruncher, which is not often in a comp. Cause nearly every other comp has a dito or saturator, it’s a new think I am very glad.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzOrxeqqHoc&t=3s
MRG
onSome nice Underworld-ish vibes there…
Mariusz
onA lot od good job👍 Gui is not bad