A full day yesterday working on my compressor. It all seems to work. Here's a plain sine wave compressed by 2:1 at 6dB with the Sony Dynamic Compressor:
Here's mine, with the same settings:
The 6dB line is the upper grey line, so the values over that should be halved. You might notice this looks exactly right on mine but the Sony one cuts a bit more, it's a little bit below half. This, perhaps, is due to a volume trace which doesn't hug the level so tightly (or a loose gate). Either way, my version is better in that respect, but it is more severe in its clamping, though not so much to be audible.
The slope at the start is the slow (50ms) gate kicking in. My linear one looked a bit digital, so I changed it to a smooth curve using: smoothgate=sinf(gate*PI+ONEANDAHALFPI)/2+0.5f
I remember now why I did this; it's because I haven't got a comparable effect and I needed one to process my audiobook tracks. Before now, I had to use SoundForge for those because Prometheus couldn't load such large files, and I also needed a compressor up to the job. In audio tests it all seems to work and is remarkably fast and simple. It's strange in life how things which once seemed impossible or supreme can, in future years, seem small and trivial without any indication of when this transition occurred.
I've named it Stone Compression. My other one is called Wire Compression because the volume trace reminded me of a wire running along the sound wave. This one is more solid, like mountains. My reverbs are named after gasses, so the compressors can be named after materials.
Enough with this! I've not be artistically active in a few weeks, not since before Morecambe. I need to move on and start making things. One last trip this evening, to Manchester to see the poet Jackie Kay.
