Developer Robbert van der Helm has released Spectral Compressor, a FREE compressor for Windows and Mac.
I’ll readily admit that I have too many compressors, as I’m sure everyone does at this point. Despite the plethora of dynamics processors in my plugin folder, there is always room for one more.
Spectral Compressor is something familiar but done in a very novel way for me, at least. It gets into the magic of spectral processing, which always comes across as audio sorcery.
The developer of Spectral Compressors blithely asks if anyone has ever wondered what a 16,384 band OTT would sound like. Spectral Compressor can be intensely aggressive, immediately crushing things into digital noise.
In smaller strokes, it does call to mind OTT. However, a spectral compressor offers much more control, letting you fine-tune how it compresses the audio every step of the way.
Despite its advanced control setup, Spectral Compressor has a fairly straightforward interface. You have a universal threshold with controls for the center frequency, slope, mode, and curve.
You also have global controls that dictate the window size, overlap, and the attack and release of the compressor envelope. After that, you can control the upward and downward compression of the plugin itself. This is handled with the use of independent ratios.
Spectral Compressor readily smashes things way down if you want, but it has some other interesting uses. You can feed it a sidechain signal to match the spectrums of both materials, effectively morphing it into a completely different sound.
It can also be more moderate in its use, taking a sedate approach to compression. Whatever your poison is when it comes to dynamic control, this is a fun tool to explore and use for sound design. It might not replace that drum bus compressor you love so much, but it has its merits.
Spectral Compressor is available for Windows, Linux, and macOS. You might run into permission errors with macOS, as I did when installing. However, that is easy enough to bypass. Nightly releases are available for all operating systems, with updates coming semi-frequently.
Download: Spectral Compressor (FREE)
More:
