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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Last Updated on January 24, 2023 by Tomislav Zlatic.
