Shorter minimum attack and release times for Compressor

[Trebor]

Split from http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic ... 47&t=82140

And while we are on the subject , why is the minimum release-time on Audacity's native compressor one second ? ...

Audacity's native compressor, minimum realease time is one second#.gif (6.85 KiB) Viewed 2793 times

Release-times of less than second are not unusual ...

Release: This setting determines the time in which the “compressed” sound will return back to normal gain, or volume settings after the threshold is crossed in the reverse direction. The release time is usually given in milliseconds to seconds and typical ranges are from 25 milliseconds to 4 or more seconds.

http://mustech.net/2009/03/[u]basic-aud ... ompression[/u]/

Maybe it's confusion between milliseconds and seconds :
minimum attack-time of 0.1 milliseconds and minimum-release of 1.0 milliseconds would be fine.

[Trebor]

More evidence for the prosecution ...

... ball‑park figures ... Attack and release times depend on the style of the track and the action of the compressor, but I would start with 1‑3 ms for the attack and 250‑350 ms for the release

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/oct09/a ... 1009_2.htm

I often use a release time of 200ms , ( i.e. 0.2 seconds ), which is not currently possible with Audacity's native compressor whose minimum release-time is 1 second.

IMO the attack as short as possible , less than millisecond if possible , and not longer than 3 milliseconds.
Again Audacity's native compressor does not permit this : with a minimum attack of 0.1 seconds , i.e. 100 milliseconds.

[steve]

Slow attack/release times can work very well for subtly reducing the dynamic range just a little, particularly for classical music which can have a huge dynamic range in an unprocessed recording. It seems that was the only type of use case that the writer of that compressor was considering. I'm +1 for a new compressor effect, but I voted for that a long time ago.

[Paul L]

Tell me more about what a new compressor effect should do, besides the triviality of allowing shorter attack and release settings.

[billw58]

Tell me more about what a new compressor effect should do, besides the triviality of allowing shorter attack and release settings.

Oh boy, that's a big can of worms.

IMNSHO it should behave like a real (hardware) compressor.

To put it mildly, the Audacity compressor is quirky. You could start with this discussion in the manual:
http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/Talk:Compressor

That links to a thread that is unfortunately in the Forum Crew sub-board, so accessible to only a few.

This would be similar to the Noise Removal rewrite: throw out the old compressor and start over with the goal of designing something that behaves the way most sound engineers expect a compressor to behave.

Oh, and a compressor is one effect (of several) that benefits greatly from real-time preview.

-- Bill

[Trebor]

To put it mildly, the Audacity compressor is quirky ...

I thought it would be a simple matter of moving a decimal point three places : where it says "secs" becomes "ms" (milliseconds).

[kozikowski]

I thought it would be a simple matter

Without considering Feature Creep.
"As long as we're here...."
Koz

[billw58]

I thought it would be a simple matter of moving a decimal point three places

Paul asked about a new compressor effect, and I answered. That doesn't mean we couldn't do as you suggest.
-- Bill

[steve]

Tell me more about what a new compressor effect should do

Along the same lines as Bill, I think the shipped compressor should be as close to "Classic" as possible. There are lots of quirky compressors available as plug-ins.
Compressors are not the most simple effects to use. As Bill wrote, a compressor benefits greatly from real time preview.

I'd be happy for Audacity to also ship a "simple compressor" or a "limiter" or a simple "automatic gain adjustment" or similar, but I think that the one that we call "the Audacity Compressor" should be "classic". Anyone that is familiar with how compressors work should have a good idea of how it will behave. If a novice user reads up on the theory of dynamic range compressors, they should see what they have read in action in the Audacity Compressor.

[cpsmusic]

Tell me more about what a new compressor effect should do, besides the triviality of allowing shorter attack and release settings.

One thing that would be useful to me would be an adjustable make-up gain control.