I’d like to talk a little bit about the way a compressor and an expander can be written with the Audio Toolkit. Even if both effects use far less filters than the SD1 emulation, they still implement more than just one filter in the pipeline, contrary to a fixed delay line (another audio plugin that I released with the compressor and the expander).

Block diagram

So first the block diagram of a compressor (it is the same for an expander):

The pipeline is quite obvious: start by detecting the power of the signal (a simple square with an AR(1) and a memory of 1ms for these plugins), create from this power an amplitude function through the GainCompressionFilter, and pass it through an attack/release filter (modifying the perception of the signal’s amplitude). Then the amplitude gain is multiplied by the actual gain, and that’s it!

Behavior

Let’s see how they behave. First this is the formula I used to compute the gain for a compressor:

The idea was to use a C1 function for the signal. First everything is relative to the threshold, so the power divided by the threshold is an absolute curve. Now that this is settled, the power is converted to dB (as all curves are usually in that domain) and then an approximation of the absolute() function is used, with its parameter, the softness. If the power in dB is added to this function and then divided by 0, the resulting function will be of value 0 up to a relative power of 0dB, which means a constant amplitude gain of 0. For values higher than 0dB, the gain can be reduced by a factor depending on the slope. The final amplitude gain can be achieved by converting back the result to amplitudes.

Here are a few curves for the compressor:

And the same can be done for the expander:

The gain filters work on power values, from threshold to slope, and only returns a gain. The script takes an amplitude as input, squares it to produce the power values, processes them and then applies the gain value to the original amplitude to make the traditional graph.

Optimization

The profile for the basic compressor is quite obvious:

After tabulating the gain reduction values in a table (the table has to be properly set up for a compressor and an expander), the compressor can be blazingly fast:

Conclusion

Creating a compressor when you have all elements is easy. Now it is time to create a stereo compressor/expander from these elements!