Dancing Boy

This one has been under the radar of most people for a while now, quite unjustified as i think. Of course we all actually have too many compressor plugins nowadays, and there are many freeware and payware compressors compete for out attention. Why should anyone care?

Well, first, it is by the developer signaldust aka mystran here on KVR who has given us several freeware plugins and is a big time contributor to the DSP forum, and second: it is a good plugin at a very reasonable price.

So, let's take a deeper dive: As the description says, it is a VCA-style feed forward compressor. I might be wrong here, but one does not see those too often in plugin world apart from the occasional dbx16X emulation. It has all the features one expects from a compressor of that kind plus some more: There is a mix knob for parallell compression which is indispensable nowadays in my opinion, and also, a bit more uncommon, a range knob. What this does is limiting the amount of gain reduction to the set value, so for example if one sets it to 5db the compressor will never apply more than this amount of gain reduction to the signal (simplified explanation, the correct one is in the manual). Dancing Boy also features negative compression ratio for some weirder effect compression and the release behavior can be switched between "auto" and "fixed", allowing for either more natural or more character release behaviour.

Oh yes, the ratio. The way this is used here is a tad irritating at first, as you don't see the usual n:1 numbers when using the ratio, you see a percentage. So to get to your conventional notation, you have to do some calculation:

For values from 0-100%, it is 100/ (100-value), so a value of 75% gives you 100/ (100-75) = 4, a ratio of 4:1. For values from 101-200%, use whatever you like :-)

You can get used to this kind of presentation, but i personally think it is not necessary and a bit confusing.

Now, what can we use this compressor for? It shines on drums and percussive material where you can go wild on the settings and have fun with the extreme results (use mix or range if you need to get back to reality), but for more transparent compression with less gain reduction I also found it useful on guitars, vocals and other tracks. And why not try it on a bus or the master bus? It sure isn't a one trick pony, it looks simple but can do a lot.

All this comes wrapped in a nice, although unspectacular GUI which is quite usable and legible but still could be a little bit bigger. The CPU usage is low enough to use it on lots of tracks.

I deduct 1 point for the unusual ratio display but all in all it is a great compressor for little money. Try the demo.