GComp

I guess I was surprised to see that no-one had reviewed G-Comp before 2011; because I have used it to teach others what compression actually does, in a graphical sense.

The ability to see the input and output waveforms is useful as is the direct control of the threshold, knee and other functions as well.

Graham did a great job keeping this simple, but giving a view under the hood to help with the visual understanding of the signal manipulation.

Make sure to check out Graham's other plugins if you want a basic suite of 'get the job done' plugins, some with handy visuals just like this one.Read Review

GComp is OLD! but never the less, it's great, and it's free.

I guess there's no review because it's so darn basic, and that is somehow that i love about this little piece of brilliance. It's simple and straight out, what you tweak is just what it does, without all the hyped saturation and character everybody is screaming their lungs on the border of collapsing about. Yea i love saturation myself, and i really do love character, but it's nice to have a simple plug-in thats capable of doing all the simple stuff thats needed sometimes.

We all know compressors so i don't need to review the controls all that much, so instead i will tell about the cool things about GComp, and that is the visuals of both channels, and that you can see the before and after results in a sound wave form. Another cool thing is that you can unlink the stereo, so that it can function individually on the left and right, this is maybe the best feature, and often not found in free ones.

It also have a limiter function, and although it is limiting, it's in my opinion only usable on instruments, which then again, is useless, because thats why you compress.

GComp is great on synths you want to keep at the a tightly desired level, and if the synth has a great stereo field with a lot of bouncing, GComp still gets the job done with the unlinking feature, without lowering the whole sound. It's also usable on drums and vocals, but not perfect, as often because it is just a simple compressor.Read Review