With all the current innovations and unique approaches in the plugin realm, we tend to lose focus on some of the more traditional tools to brighten up our music, and with it our day, especially when they are free. In this article, we are glad to announce one such example with this solid, totally forever free compressor plugin by Jon V Audio.
FirComp is still in full development, so says the developer himself, so one may bump into a potential bug along the road, although it is certainly worth the effort to give this device a few test-runs, because the developer has plans moving forward with this product, and it will never cost you a dime.
FirComp is a punchy and lively compressor well-suited for tracks and busses. It has a nice feature-set, such as look-ahead smoothing, zero-latency setting and a sidechain filter slider which we find especially useful in most mixing scenarios. It is low on CPU, and when driven hard it produces a subtle amount of soft distortion that blends well with the vibe it produces. Did we mention it was free?
Its full feature-set:
- Simple UI
- Fast workflow
- Attack stage tuned for punch
- True zero attack (same-sample) when “0.0 ms” is selected
- Dual parallel release stage with program-dependent behavior. No need to stack multiple devices in series!
- Easy sidechain filtering options for common mixing situations
- Optional digital FIR lookahead gain smoothing with perfect timing, no artefacts and minimum distortion
- Low CPU DSP code written in a mix of C++ and SSE intrinsics.
- Fully 64-bit audio path used for all DSP calculations
- Zero latency with lookahead off. With lookahead on, compensated latency of 64, 128, or 256 samples depending on sample rate (approximately 1.3 to 1.5 ms)
FirComp is available for Windows and MacOS 10.11+, in VST3 and AU2 formats.
Although it is forever free, for the price of a coffee you can still support this dedicated developer with a small donation via his product page linked at the bottom of the page. But first, have some genuine costless fun with this simple but well-thought-out compression tool.
Jon V Audio offers FirComp for free, always and forever.
