A tube compressor with a warm, characterful sound, made like a little glazed widget. Turn the big puck in the middle and it squeezes harder; the further it turns, the harder the tube inside is driven, so heavy compression also sounds richer.
Threshold is the puck in the middle, from 0 down to −40 dB. Turn it up and it squeezes more. There is no tube knob: the lower Threshold goes, the harder the tube is driven. Auto makeup brings the level back up by about what Threshold and Ratio take away, so turning it never just makes things quieter.
Attack from 0.1 to 100 ms and Release from 20 ms to 2 s, with a release that slows down after long, deep compression. Or turn the little Auto knob beside Release to a note, from 1/64 to a bar, and the compressor lets go within it, breathing with the beat of your song.
The little Low knob beside Mix, up to 250 Hz: below it, the sound skips the compressor and the tube, so a kick or a bass keeps its punch and never sets the compressor off. Mix blends in the dry signal for parallel compression, lined up with the tube so nothing smears.
White, Grey, Blue and Black, with the four little buttons at the top. The skin is saved with your project, and the window can be resized from small to large.
An asymmetric tube stage, run at twice the sample rate, adds even and odd harmonics without aliasing, then an output transformer adds a little low end and a soft top.
A stereo-linked RMS detector and a wide soft knee: it squeezes harder the louder it gets, the way a variable-mu tube compressor does.
Worked out from Threshold and Ratio, never from the signal, so it does not pump. Switch it off to set the level yourself with Output.
From a gentle 1:1 glue to hard limiting, with Input and Output sliders of ±24 dB and a gain reduction meter under the puck.
Glue, Drum Bus, Kick Snap, Vocal, Bass, Pump, Parallel, Warm, Smash and Master, and save your own settings under a name.
One button. While it is on, the knobs' white lights pulse, so you always see it.
C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3. There is nothing to run; the zip's How to install file has every step.Help with installing · To remove it on Windows, delete the Widget Compressor.vst3 folder from that VST3 folder.
$25, once. Taxes are worked out at checkout.
Download Widget Compressor, open it in your DAW and choose Start trial. No account and no browser are needed. You get every feature for 30 days on that computer. After that it passes sound through unchanged until you activate a license; your projects keep their settings.
Three at a time, as long as you are the one using it. Deactivate one to move to another.
Any DAW that loads VST3 plug-ins, such as Ableton Live, FL Studio, Cubase, Reaper, Studio One and Bitwig, and Logic Pro and GarageBand as an Audio Unit on a Mac. There is no AAX version, so not in Pro Tools.
It runs Widget Compressor on its own, with no DAW, on your computer's audio input. It starts with the input muted, so speakers and a microphone do not feed back: choose your audio device and unmute the input under Options.
In %APPDATA%\Widget Compressor\User Presets.json, shared by every project and the standalone app.
Yes: Widget Compressor is its new name, and the presets you saved under the old name come along.
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