The Unisum Mastering Compressor from Tone Projects might amaze you. Perhaps. Probably maybe.
However (ahem) it is not for the faint of heart. The control it gives you will be some user’s dreams, and others will just sit and stare. I leave the “reviews” to you when you use the stuff, but I am highly leaning towards “amazing” when it comes to this.
The Unisum Mastering Compressor has the usual attack, release, threshold, ratio controls. But then it presents a big leap. You can control the knee, “relax” (the linearity of the compression curve), release curve, and gain (limits the gain reduction). A lot of compressors offer some or all of these, but as you use this you will see (and hear) that Tone Projects takes this to another level.
The HYGGE button alters the harmonics and transient response. As you can see in the chart below, at it’s simplest it adds more (controlled) harmonic distortion as part of the compression process.
There are a number of presets under the style menu to get you started. The graphs below should give you a general idea of what is going on.
But if you want even more control, then click the ‘edit style’ panel and you will be presented with this:
At this point you should be scurrying to the manual and reserving several hours to test out the additional controls! As Tone Projects says in the manual, this is not AI.
Hints:
- The HYGGE “circuit” is processor intensive. Best to not try to use the ‘realtime quality’ setting until bounce/mixdown. They tell you this, but I am confirming it.
- If you ever wanted to do gentle multiband compression, for very subtle tweaking of the sound, the Multiband Detector in the style edit window is the place to be.
- Going into an almost clip-type limiter (on the 20 to 1 ratio) with an adjustable soft knee and curve (as well as the ability to adjust for transients) is one of the coolest things ever for transparent limiting.
