Molot

One of my favourite compressor plugins - relatively easy to use and imparts a nice vintage sound to your material. Can absolutely smash drum busses if you need it to.

Excellent compressor, Fairchild 670 style, low CPU usage with 1x upsampling, effective makeup function. Tested 0.3.1 (2ch) version.

I like the VU meter and the modes (a lot of configurations).

Amazing plugin... and free.

Great reviews chaps.

I'll give a quick one of my own.

I don't really have a clue how this thing works, so you should probably stop reading here.

I have however, had some great results using it for typical compression stuff and side-chain pumping stuff. Just be aware that there is a switch to alternate between the native language and English. Might help at some point.

This beauty can be quite hard to dial in. It has a lot of controls. These just give you extra power. Knowing what the typical corresponding knobs on a typical compressor do, might help as well. There is nothing overtly flashy or gimmicky here. It is bread and butter stuff. But what Bread! What Butter.

Even if you were a newbie, you would find your way around.

The best thing about this compressor is that it is free. Find your way about it and save yourself fifty-hundred quid. This guy deserves donations big time.

Did I mention it sounds great. That is like saying the latest Iron smooths clothes straight. Oh well.

Just gonna have to try it eh?

To go back to what I originally said: I don't know how this really works. I knock it up. I twiddle a few knobs. It sounds great or bloody horrible. You pays yer money, yer takes yer choice. It is a lot of fun. It is very tweakable and powerful. And free.

Give this guy a couple of bucks. He more than deserves it.

Oh, and it isn't that hard to learn if yo know a bit about compressors in the first place. Just make sure you have the 'English' switch on, or you might be at a bit of a disadvantage. :-)

It's free, it looks great and it's got a lot of knobs. For this reason it was one of the first compressor plugs I ever tried out. A couple of years later and I'm still astonished by this thing. Don't think because it's free that it's in some way inferior to a compressor with a huge price tag. This is up there with the most advanced software compressors ever created.

Variable attack envelopes, mid/side effects, high pass on the sidechain, optional warm saturation, knee shape, upsampling and parallel. There really isn't an option left out. It's also the only compressor I've ever seen that has a mid-scoop eq. Not sure why you'd really need one built into the compressor but I've come to like it being there.

One thing it won't do however is a huge squish. Even when I max out the ratio and threshold it remains fairly civilized and only reduces around 20db. But I guess no sensible person would ever really want to do more than that.

Two hints for noobs:

a)The alpha/sigma switch changes the attack shape. Alpha is more standard and sigma lets most of the original signal pass through the attack. No matter how many times I use Molot I still seem to forget which is which.

b) The limiter has two possible routings: "Pre" - compressor -> limiter -> EQ -> Makeup -> Dry Mix, or "Post" - compressor -> EQ -> Makeup -> Dry Mix -> limiter. Don't get confused like I did and wonder why the heck anyone would want to use a limiter before the compressor. To make things worse there is unfortunately a bug on the latest version (3.1) that means the limiter is always set to the "pre" routing. Hopefully we see a fix for this soon.

The only real problem you might have with Molot is that it is in fact too big and versatile for your needs. Sometimes it's simpler to reach for a compressor with just a few knobs.

An inspiring and artful plugin... definitely worth clicking on the donate button...

PS: The VU meter isn't without a few idiosyncrasies! It does a good job of GR but it doesn't read the input very precisely. On the 2.168 version it does a passable job but it certainly isn't reading the peaks and occasionally it reads well above. On the 3.1 version it is considerably worse and often reads way way above. This could be a bug or it could be an alternative approach to modelling. Either way it's not very useful. Thankfully the input meter is something you can easily do without. The GR meter seems to be much more accurate (on both versions). It gets the db acceptably close, bounces in the right places and is very easy to read.

I give it a 10 because I haven't heard a better software compressor for acoustic drums and bass, and it is useful for other sources as well. In short, Molot is the cats ballz. Quality! Thank you Vladg/sound. You made a great contribution to the audio software world, and you did it as freeware. You are very generous. Three thumbs up. Also, thanks for the continued development.

I have not used Limiter No.6 enough yet to comment, but I will be doing so after I get to know it more.

In response to Rosko12: The mid scoop is an eq. I find it very useful in taming mid range snap on snare, for adding a little to mid light sources, and for just changing the general character of the source. The mode knob is for matching Molot to different sources - mono, stereo, m/s, etc.