Squeezer

Flexible general-purpose audio compressor with a touch of citrus

About

I wrote this compressor to learn all I could about audio compression. It took me several months to gather all the specs and papers I needed and convert them into code.

Squeezer is different from all the compressors I know: its knobs are stepped to fine-tuned preset values, but can be changed to continuous values by clicking a small orange light located next to them. This allows you to find nice settings fast while not preventing optimisation of settings.

Squeezer adapts easily to many tastes and use cases:

• feed-forward & feed-back design
• linear, logarithmic & smooth release stage
• optical & FET detectors
• peak & RMS sensing
• hard, medium & soft knee
• flexible side-chain & parallel compression

Squeezer has given me a deep insight into compression. But above that, it has quickly become my go-to generic compressor!

I hope that you have as much fun with this compressor as I had when I coded it!

FAQ

Squeezer crashes when the plug-in is loaded / opened

1. Squeezer requires a processor which supports the SSE2 instruction set (if you run at Windows 8 and above, it does). On Windows, you might also have to install the Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2017.

2. Squeezer comes with a folder called squeezer. This folder must be located in the same folder as the plug-in, so please copy it along and try again!

Some hosts (FL Studio, Bitwig) do not assign VST2 channels correctly

• As an example, a stereo plug-in might only output a mono signal.

• VST2 does not support side-chains. I have found a way around this limitation, but unfortunately some hosts will behave erratically.

• VST3 supports side-chains, so if your DAW supports it, use the VST3 plug-ins instead. As an alternative, I have created VST2 plug-ins without external side-chain inputs. They are distinguished by the words no side-chain in their name and should fix channel-assignment problems.

Where are the LV2 plug-ins?

• The last release with LV2 plug-ins was version v2.5.3. You can still download them from the "Releases" page.

The stand-alone version does not work

• Unfortunately, I cannot do anything about it as I did not code this part of the application. The stand-alone works well for me - try using another sound card or deleting the settings file.

Documentation

For documentation, licenses and further information, please see the manual and the directory doc.

Code of conduct

Please read the code of conduct before asking for help, filing bug reports or contributing to this project. Thanks!

License

Copyright (c) 2013-2022 Martin Zuther

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

Thank you for using free software!

VST2 plug-ins

Technically, my VST2 plug-ins are not free software. However, I chose to provide them for your convenience. All other binaries really are free software in the sense of the Free Software Foundation.

VST is a trademark of Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH, registered in Europe and other countries.