NastyVCS

There are not many valueable free multi-effect / channel strips available. Many lack in sound or design, but this plugin belongs to the good.

NastyVCS is an all-round-tool which you can really use even alongside expensive channel strips. It offers many special things like a saturation knob, an AIR-Filter (which really surprised me), boost and cut low-end filter, and many different sounding attack and release modes for the compressor.

Plus it offers a sidechain capability and you can enable/disable individual sections for quick A/B comparison. A much appreciated feature which many pricy competitors are missing.

And this isn't in 32-bit only despite being a bit aged. VOS updated NastyVCS to 64-bit in 2021.

Really worth to at least checking it out, even if you already have fency channel strips in your arsenal.

I love this plugin. NastyVCS is in CamelCrusher/CamelPhat territory, but potentially with higher sound quality and CPU use. Compared to those, NastyVCS seems geared more towards mixing and mastering than sound design.

NastyVCS is a great saturation, analog eq, muli-type compressor, and a parallel limiter! -Plus more! It's somewhat like the famous FerricTDS, but has a lot more features. The saturation and the many compression types are capable of being very aggressive, but can easily be dialed in to subtle amounts or beautifully mixed in parallel via the DAW.

It does so much that it was daunting at first, but it's very easy to use once you realize you can approach the modules individually, like on VladG's excellent Limiter No6. On the NastyVCS, the button to turn on the modules is marked "IN" underneath.

I am completely confident about even having NastyVCS at the end of my mastering chain. The limiter knob is a wet/dry parallel NY brickwall compressor, o at 100% it's fully engaged - it gets very loud in Fast mode with the comp makeup gain or the input gain turned up. To finely dial back the output to curb ISPs, the trick is to hold Shift, rather than Ctrl.

I want to be able to confidently use it on any track (instead of my default, excellent and extremely low CPU use comp/saturation/basic limiting chain of Reaper ReaComp & Melda MEqualizer. For example, ReaComp + MEqualizer + CamelCrusher all working hard runs at ~1% CPU use on my vista laptop, whereas a similarly extreme setting with NastyVCS runs at ~1.5%). I suggest the solution of providing the option to remove oversampling on all of the VoS plugins. NastyVCS likely oversamples 4x like FerricTDS. I suspect that it directly corresponds to the CPU Use, which is still very reasonable considering all the modules.

Bridged in 64-bit Reaper, I've had issues with NastyVCS randomly permanently silencing output and having to be reset. However, on my current 32-bit setup NastyVCS has always run perfectly.

Overall, is this plugin still 10/10? Absolutely. Excellent work, Herbert. Thank you.