Polarity has released Polarity-Glue, a free SSL-inspired bus compressor for macOS, Windows, and Linux.
Polarity-Glue is designed for compressing drum buses, instrument groups, and complete mixes. It applies one shared gain envelope to help multiple elements move together.
It’s clearly inspired by Ableton Live’s Glue Compressor (which is basically The Glue by Cytomic). Much like its Ableton counterpart, this is a gentle feedback-style bus compressor with linked stereo gain and a ratio-dependent knee.
The main controls are Threshold, Makeup, Range, Mix, and stepped selections for Ratio, Attack, and Release. You can set the ratio to 2:1, 4:1, or 10:1, while the seven attack times run from an extremely fast 0.01 ms to 30 ms.
The developer recommends starting with 2:1 or 4:1, a 10 or 30 ms attack, Auto release, and around 1–4 dB of gain reduction. That slower attack lets the leading edge of a kick or snare pass before the compressor works on the body.
The Auto Makeup function analyzes 2 seconds of audio, measures the level lost due to compression, and applies the resulting compensation. This makes A/B testing easier, but it is not a continuous loudness-matching system.
You can also disable Auto Makeup and set the gain manually. The Mix knob blends the phase-matched dry and wet paths, while Range limits the depth of gain reduction and affects how the compressor recovers.
There’s also the four-second waveform history that shows the input, output, threshold, and gain reduction, alongside a traditional gain-reduction needle with optional peak hold. The interface has A/B slots for comparing two setups, local user presets, and scaling from 75% to 200%.
The detector includes a 20–2000 Hz high-pass filter, and that lets you prevent a loud kick or heavy bass from making the entire bus pump. An external sidechain input is available when you want another track to control the compression.
Polarity-Glue also includes an optional output clipper for catching peaks after makeup gain and dry/wet mixing. It has a -0.1 dBFS sample ceiling rather than true-peak limiting, so pushing it hard will add distortion.
Separate quality settings let you use lower oversampling during playback and up to 16x when rendering. The compression and clipping both run at the selected internal rate, while higher settings require more CPU and add filter latency.
We previously featured Polarity’s free Polarity-MD multiband dynamics processor and the more experimental Polarity-RES resonator. Polarity-Glue is more conventional, but definitely worth a look if you’re missing this type of compressor in your DAW.
The download process is simple. Choose your operating system on the product page, and the installer downloads directly, with no account, email signup, license key, iLok, subscription, or telemetry.
Polarity-Glue v0.1.3 is available in CLAP and VST3 formats for 64-bit Windows and Linux, plus CLAP, VST3, and AUv2 for Intel and Apple Silicon Macs. A standalone version is included on all three platforms.
Download: Polarity-Glue (FREE)
Deal of the day 🔥: Get the VATRA mix finisher plugin by Flame Sound!More:
- Polarity releases Polarity-RES, a FREE resonator effect
- Polarity releases Polarity-MD, a FREE multiband dynamics processor
Last Updated on September 14, 2026 by Tomislav Zlatic.
