Features:

• Double precision compression algorithm tuned for maximum clarity and smoothness
• Drawable compression curve
• Generalized ratio and threshold controls for arbitrary compression curves
• Moving history of input level and gain reduction
• Attack times from 0.01 ms to 1000 ms, release times from 1 ms to 5000 ms
• Flexible attack and release shapes
• Time or dB based approach to attack and release shapes
• Feed forward or feed backward compression
• Sidechain gain detection path with low- and highpass filter (soloable)
• Optional external sidechain
• Independent stereo or linked operation
• Hold times up to 500 ms
• Optional 2x/4x oversampling, with choice between IIR and FIR downsampling filter
• Wet/dry operation
• A comprehensive set of presets
• In- and outgain: -20 dB –> 20 dB
• Custom options for VU metering and colour palette
• Available as a VST, VST3, AU and AAX plugin in 32 and 64 bit format for Windows and Mac OSX (10.7 and higher). Intel only, Apple Silicon under construction.

https://ddmf.eu/comprezzore/

Normal price: 66,00 € + VAT (so around 80€ for most), but it is currently at a 40% Black Friday discount!


Note: I'm in no way affiliated with DDMF. I'm just a super loyal DDMF customer who just purchased this beast of a plugin and think it should be seen by all! Christian is a mad genius when it comes to DSP! He is after all the DSP author of the Magic Death Eye plugins!

Here is the Email I received this morning.



Dear DDMF customers,

there have been numerous emails in the past few weeks asking about a Black Friday sale at the DDMF web store. The answer is, of course, a resounding YES! Starting right now, and lasting until late (Cyber) Monday evening, a 40 percent discount will be applied to everything you decide to put in your shopping cart. This means it's not only the individual plugins or apps, but even the bundles which are, as you know, already quite heavily discounted. So whatever piece of DDMF gear might still be missing in your collection, now is the time to get it over at the DDMF site. And for all iOS producers: there's a 40 percent discount for the DDMF ios apps as well, the exact starting time being determined by when Apple decides it is Friday in your time zone.

Okay, speaking of missing gear: there is one piece that you definitely don't have yet, and that's because it just came out today! Please give a very warm welcome to Comprezzore, the new and shiny compression plugin that will replace our old friend NYCompressor. After the releases of the two MagicDeathEye compressors, I felt that I had learned so much about software compression in the last few years that it was time to raise DDMFs dedicated digital compression workhorse to another level.

This plugin is, in some respect, complimentary to the MDE compressors, as it is definitely not hardware modelled, but meant to explore the vast possibilities that are possible when staying purely in the digital territorry. You can sculpt your own custom gain reduction curves, nicely adapted to your source material, but that's only the beginning: you can shape your attack and release curves in various ways, whether you want a fast attack which should then gradually become slower, or the other way round, or maybe hold the gain reduction for a few milliseconds... You can also switch from "time" to "dB" mode when shaping your attack and release curves, which means you can not only specify the behaviour as a function of time after a transient (attack) or loudness drop (release), but also as a function of the strength (in dB) of those events.

Metering is another important feature in compressors. With Comprezore, you can customize the dB points where the transition between the green, yellow, orange and red colours are happening. Not only that: you can choose your own set of colours if you prefer! While we're at it, you can customize a great deal of the colour palette of the whole plugin, too...

There's more to talk about, but I can already imagine you are a bit overwhelmed at this point. So why don't you simply try out the free demo (settings are not saved + an occasional second of silence) and see & hear for yourself what it's like to work with Comprezzore? Learning by doing is always the best approach, I think. And if you like it, which I'm sure you will, well, thank God it's Black Friday and Comprezzore comes with an intro offer of 40 percent off the usual $79. So until Monday evening, it's $47 only!

There will be an extended coupon for DDMF customers, but not at 40 percent... the details will be announced next week. But for now, that's definitely as good as it gets!



Okay, to wrap things up: 40 percent off everything, including the brand new Comprezzore!

Thanks for your attention, all the best & stay healthy,

Christian


P.S. an Apple Silicon version is in the making, but right now it's Intel all the way. Which should work just fine thanks to Rosetta 2!

How does one pronounce it lol, seem interesting, plugins are just leaping forward these days.

Compre-zzore
Comprez-zore

Right there you have my attention

Yep. I demoed it, too, and will be purchasing soon. I love that it is its own animal. Not copied from anything. Fresh. I barely scratched the surface but I've seen/heard enough to know I want it. Also, I think I'll go with the Dynamics Bundle at $51.00. That is just $3.60 more than the Comprezzore alone and includes LinComp (linear phase multiband compressor) and NoLimits (lookahead limiter) in the bargain.

$239.40 Full Bundle - All DDMF plugins + standalone apps. OSX + Windows (except Virtual Audio Recorder and Virtual Audio Stream, which are Windows only).

Amazing deal for the most underrated plugins.

I've been using it now for a few hours and here are my initial impressions:

In it's current state it's a bit of a flawed gem. The good thing is that the "gem" part is in the sound and the possibilities. The "flawed" part is in the user interface and in some missed opportunities on the compression side of things.

This is utterly flexible and awesome. If you know what you are doing, you can pretty much model almost any kind of compression style with this thing. Not perhaps as deeply program dependently as Unisum but in a similar way. It's really easy to get really smooth mastering type compression going, where it just gently smooths out the overall dynamics while keeping the integrity of everything.

There are however a few things I'm sorely missing here, stuff that perhaps Christian and the beta testers just didn't even think of. For instance, the 'Hold' parameter could have been integrated into the Release block and thus allow the user to smoothly transition from large hold values to small or zero hold values. This would be extremely useful when treating a drumbus where you'd perhaps want quite a bit of hold going on when the overall beat is playing but very little hold during a fill that ramps up the dynamics unevenly. Thus using hold as it is now, it can easily lead to unmusical pumping while sounding awesome when things are predictable and static.

Another thing I'm extremely surprised is missing, is a simple Knee control. It's very tedious and fiddly to setup hard knee compression with this thing. Everything is smoothed out all the time. Sometimes I just want that super aggressive hard knee type of smack. You can do it, but it takes some fiddling with the additional nodes that you have to insert in the transfer function display (with a right mouse click).

I'm also slightly annoyed by the fact that you can't link threshold and ratio so that they move together. This becomes especially fiddly when playing with multiple additional nodes. It gets even more fiddly when you realize you can't insert any nodes below the threshold. This thing is capable of doing upwards compression but that means you have to first put the main 'T' (threshold) node all the way down and then recreate whatever compression curve you wanted with additional nodes that you then have very little control over in a flexible and easy to operate manner.

Finally there is the lack of variable stereo linking. I really wish it wasn't just an on/off button but rather a flexible linking system. I'd even like it to be frequency dependent so that I could choose what frequency ranges cause it to be linked/unlinked. Of course this can be done by the user by using an external sidechain and a mid/side EQ as the source for the filtering but it's yet another extra plugin to add to the mix.


On the usability side, oh boy are there a lot of things slightly wonky here.. there are no default knob positions. You can't return to safe, sane default knob states when you've tweaked out of bounds. Not even dry/wet, input nor output knobs have defaults at zero as one would expect. Then there is the GR metering which is annoying at best. Yes it's cool to see the overall dynamics going on but I'd much rather just have a precise and extremely responsive normal GR meter instead, ala Unisum or FF Pro-C (which implements both).

Also, the A <> B copy state button isn't working at the moment. I've reported that bug and hopefully it'll get fixed at some point.

Feels like this comp was released in a rush. As bmanic wrote there is lots of room for usability improvements. The direction of the ratio knob rotation is counter-intuitive. It chrashed Cubase 11 on win10 when switching on oversampling or switching from A to B. The compression action is nice if you take the time to tweak it to your needs. I can imagine this becoming a great universal comp plugin in a few months after some updates.

Hard to resist this on sale

Update:

Apparently you CAN change the knee, with mouse wheel.

The GUI has a lot of room for improvement, I do not understand why that giant viewer, and the attack and release, and such small knobs ..

I don't like to criticize GUIs, in general I don't consider them important, but this is not the case.

Well, they ARE sort of important. I do agree that they could be made a lot smaller and still be useful. You only really have to kind of see the shape. The knobs values provide all the timing visuals anyhow.

Yeah, agreed. The UI could definitely benefit from some input from someone like @ b0se . Usability in general could improve a lot. I find it quite annoying how the user created nodes get shrunk/compressed when moving the threshold knob, instead of staying in relative position and shape to it. When I create an intricate precise transfer function, I don't want that shape to change! I just want to move the overall threshold around. The ratio knob should change the shape and the overall ratio of the shape I've created, not the threshold knob!


Here are the current bugs I've found:

1) When stereo LINK is selected, external side chain doesn't work
2) A/B save state doesn't work in the demo (apparently it works just fine in the full version). Christian already responded to this and will be fixing it.

Sort of a bug/usability issue: When using the Solo SC button, it doesn't take the dry/wet knob into account and thus it can get very confusing if you have a blend going while trying to tweak the sidechain filtering.

To be honest I dont know of much if any compressor plugin that has variable stereo linking save maybe for Unison?
Is it only applicable for only mastering applications?

Yeah it's not as common as I'd hope. There are a dozen or so compressors that do have it though. Pro-C, Unisum, DMG Audio plugins (all of them), Voxengo etc.

It's however extremely useful! Sometimes you want just a tiny bit of unlinked action as it's always a bit less rigid than fully linked.. Especially on instruments/busses where there is a high chance of warping the stereo image suddenly due to a large peak in one of the channels.

But yeah, for mastering it is really important to be able to fine tune the breathing stereo image vs image stability.

The feature is also extremely easy for any developer to include. It's basically just controlling the stereo width of the incoming audio for the sidechain. That's it.. so a simple mid/side matrix before the sidechain would do it. Thus you actually can do variable linking yourself with any compressor that has external sidechain input. It's just a matter of convenience.

Got to agree with the UI choices, the knobs are tiny but there’s a ton of space available, some strange choices & the “Comprezzore” logo is not good, cheapens the plugin.

The sound is lush though and I’m getting some interesting movement.

I have faith in DDMF to get this right. Bought

Since I emailed there support about 2 weeks ago on a problem with one of there plugins and received no reply what so ever , I’m done with DDMF

I think this thing is incredible sonically. You can really dial in a whole bunch of different styles. Exactly what I've been looking for

I agree with the others about the interface currently.

I would love to see -

- a simple gain reduction meter in addition to the graph.
- the ability to hide the graph.
- the ability to undo, return to a default value
- AB function that works
- Hard/soft knee control without tweaking the graph as mentioned before (like a less advanced mode)
- Ratio value displayed (a less advanced too mode perhaps)

Otherwise its excellent, but once you've set the parameters, its a little too easy just to nudge something the wrong way and get a totally unusable result. Would be great if it could be condensed down to a few controls after you've done the initial setup under the hood.

Great work though, well done!

Agree with all the comments above...this has great potential if it is going to be an ongoing project. As is, i think in practise it might be a little fiddly to warrant the time it takes to set up (as there are still things missing from it, so i can't get as detailed as i would like to anyway)
The sound is quite brilliant (to my ears)
Would love to see variable peak/rms detection too!!

I’m finding the GUI layout really confusing.

I can’t seem to see the actual readout of what ratio I’m using & the little tiny knobs are strange too, are they just the same as dragging the image?

It sounds fantastic sonically though and I guess it’s GUI is making me listen more and come up with different from my go to settings, but I’m missing not being able to quickly dial in my go to’s.

On the positive side, the two plugins I own of theirs, metaplugin and plugin doctor, seem to get updated and improved weekly. I can’t imagine that is true for the rest of their line, but I’ve been impressed with their handling of these two.

There are no readouts for the ratio and threshold knobs. They are simply "infinite" encoder types that drag the little 'T' and 'E' dots on the display. The reason it's impossible to really calculate a single number threshold or ratio is because you can fully customize the transfer function of the compressor by adding your own extra 'dots' with mouse right click on the display.

Maybe "Threshold" and "Ratio" should be renamed to "Range" and "Angle"? Might be a better fit.

The focus of this plug is transparent compression?

In the sense that all nonlinearities have been eliminated as much as possible, yes. Still, a large part of the character of a compressor lies in its compression curve and attack and release timings. So Comprezzore can take on many different personalities, not all of which you might necessarily call "clean".

Love the quality of the compression and the insane flexibility, but have to agree with some of the gui comments.

Was about to buy the bundle, but the price increased since yesterday? :(

Well, I like the new compressor. Unfortunately the demo just crashed my cubase 10.5, so that I could not reopen the project. Let's see if a system restart fixes that. :-) I used the VST2 64bit Version inside metaplugin VST3 64bit.. Win10

Generally speaking I find it also a bit hard to work with.

There is some sort of autogain missing, better readouts for gain and linking threshhold and ratio.

I also miss an easy way to (re) position in the transfer curve. e.g. some kind of (arbitrary) coordinate system that has numerical readouts. That way one could easily find again locations for the points.

AB copy settings in the demo (v1.02) don't work for me.

Sound is nice.

It does appear the bundle price has changed from $51 to $57.

And I may miss the deals altogether. I purchased their Metaplugin 3 days ago and have been unable to get the license. I have tried the "Submit" butto for the license file 5 times now but the license never arrives, and it isn't in the junk mail folder either. I tried contacting them for help, but no response to that yet either.

I know they are quality people and this will be worked out fine. It probably has to do with the long holiday weekend. But no more purchases for me until it is resolved. No hard feelings. DDMF is good people.

Were you among the users to whom I just sent out the license manually? Sorry, for a small percentage the automatically sent email simply never arrive... they are being blocked somewhere, even before reaching the spam folder.

I was indeed among the small percentage. And I did get your kind message with the link. All good now, and very much appreciated!

While it might not reflect the actual ratio,
It would be really handy to have a number there just as a reference point for operation, as with some other compressors with variable knee characteristics. Rather than reading the dots.

Another option would be to display the ratio beside each added dot.