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Compressor Feauture
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| TranceElevation |
Do you know of a way, or a feature, that allows you to reduce the ratio while bringing the threshold down and conversely to increase it while bringing the threshold up?
That would be really handy and would massively speed up the process of finding the right setting. |
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| aquila |
| In Reason you can program a Combinator's controls to do that. Not sure about other DAWs though. |
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| cryophonik |
| quote: | | [i][b]...and would massively speed up the process of finding the right setting. |
Massively speed it up? How long does it take you to turn the ratio knob? |
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| TranceElevation |
Sometimes it might take a minute or two to adjust the ratio/threshold balance. If I could move both simultaneously that would speed up the process.
Now, that might not seem that long for you, but if you have to do it almost for every channel (since I compress almost everything) imagine how much it would take in overall.
@aquila, thanks boy but am Cubase user. |
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| cryophonik |
It still doesn't make any sense. Threshold and ratio are two separate functions and they are both program-dependent, so you want to set each one according to the overall loudness and dynamic range of the material that you are working with (i.e., each separate track), and according to your objectives for each track/bus. Unless your tracks are all perfectly normalized (bad idea) and have the exact same dynamic range (they won't), your approach is going to give you different (and inconsistent) compression responses on every track. There might be some unique circumstances where you want to treat them with a reverse linear relationship, but 99% of the time, you'll set the threshold and ratio completely independent of one another. If you don't understand this, then it would serve you well to read up on how compression works.
Look at it this way, you have in every project some tracks that are loud but have a relatively small dynamic range and other tracks that are quieter but have a wide dynamic range. With your approach, the loud track gets the higher compression ratio because your threshold will have to be higher, even though it has a small dynamic range and needs less compression (i.e., a lower ratio). The quiet track with the large dynamic range OTOH gets almost no compression (even though it needs it the most) because the ratio approaches 1:1 as you drop the threshold down to the level where it starts to trigger compression. That makes no sense. |
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| TranceElevation |
| Thank you for the lecture on compression, but that was not my question. |
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| cryophonik |
That was exactly your question:
| quote: | Originally posted by TranceElevation
Do you know of a way, or a feature, that allows you to reduce the ratio while bringing the threshold down and conversely to increase it while bringing the threshold up? |
| quote: | Originally posted by TranceElevation
Sometimes it might take a minute or two to adjust the ratio/threshold balance. If I could move both simultaneously that would speed up the process. |
You're looking for a lazy, one-size-fits-all approach for compression. But, you fail to understand that each track has both a different loudness and a different dynamic range. You have two primary controls for compression to address both of those parameters, threshold and ratio, and you're trying to figure out a way to set up an inverse relationship between them to "speed up the process". But, you are failing to understand that you can't have it both ways. When you take away the independence between threshold and ratio, you take away your ability to address the loudness and dynamic range of each track independently. It's not rocket science and it's also the reason you don't see compressors with a single threshold/ratio knob.
That said, I'm sure there are some plugins that have a simple "compression" knob that will do the ratio work for you. They usually have a fixed ratio (which makes much more sense for your needs), or some algorithm that will set the ratio for you beneath the surface, based on the program-dependent nature of the audio signal. Do a google search. |
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| TranceElevation |
| You assume too much Cryo. Please don't make me laugh anymore. Asking such feature is just an option for my way of working. Most of the times I use a low ratio when the threshold is low and I generally use higher ratio when the threshold is higher. Remember that word "generally". This means that's not a mechanic thing, but a tendency I have. You like that? You don't like that? That's a whole different story...I didn't ask whether your majesty considers that right, I asked if there is a way to achieve that. |
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| cryophonik |
My opinion has nothing to do with this. It's fine with me if that's the way you want to work. The problem for you is that, as majesty of all developers, I won't allow any of them to give you what you want for the stated reasons above, so you're pretty much SOL. Or, more seriously, I don't make these decisions, I'm just explaining to you why you'll have a very hard time finding what you're looking for.
I suppose you could ask a small-time developer to make this for you. KVR has a subforum dedicated to DSP/plugin development, so maybe post a thread there to see if there are any takers? |
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| studiobob |
| Got a midi keyboard? Just map ratio to one knob and one knob to threshold. Then you can move both simultaneously which appears to be all you need? Or am I missing the point? |
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