Christian Budde has released Fast Compressor, a freeware soft knee compressor optimized for low CPU usage.
While it is not that difficult to build a hard knee compressor with a low CPU usage, it is quite difficult to do so for a soft knee, especially if you want to control the margin around the treshold precisely while maintaining a consistent curve. The compressor also features a simple limit circuit to avoid clipping.
On a 2 GHz core2 duo I was able to run > 60 instances without a problem.
Fast Compressor features
- Lightweight soft knee compressor.
- Continous and consistent characteristic.
- Fully adjustable soft knee in dB (as margin below the threshold).
- Stereo/dual mono processing.
- Extra limit circuit to avoid clips.
- Simple auto make-up gain adjustment.
- 10 presets.
- Mathematically optimised (using three psychoacoustical evaluated approximation functions).
- Open source (as part of Christian’s Delphi ASIO & VST Project).
Fast Compressor is available as a VST plug-in for Windows PC.
Visit Christian Budde for more information.
