A full day of programming. A day sans appetite of prodding Prometheus with a virtual fork. The new Firegate works well, and can replace Watergate but there are 72 songs that use it. I changed a few. Then I investigated Wire Compression, and if that can be superseded too. It works by boosting the volume by an inverse volume trace, but it's also multiplied by the gate, so if volumes are low they are not boosted to silly levels.
I experimented with including my new Stone/Fire gates, but it won't work; Wire Compression is unique and slightly organic. Here's a plain row of bass notes. This also shows why a compressor on a bass is useful, a bass tends to change volume on a per-note basis:
Here is the bass with Stone Compressor set to 8:1. It's like a conventional compressor, knocks down the upper parts. The mellow sounds a little distorted:
Here, is Wire Compressor. See how different it is, and there's no distortion:
These tests are tedious. Are they worth much? Yes, if to confirm what is good, what can be better, what is best. One thing I can take is modify Wire to use a mono source (I've only ever used it as if mono). I modified it to adjust for sample rate too. Those things make it faster and uses a few fewer floats in storage; all good.
During those changes I found a simple mistake in Firegate, A+B/2 should have been (A+B)/2; easy to miss, so that's good. Sometimes things just take time. I'll keep Stone and Wire Compressors, and phase out Watergate at some point.
