DRUGS bus compressor

What DRUGS is

DRUGS is a bus compressor with one macro control, called DOSE. Turning DOSE up makes a drum bus denser rather than louder — peak level barely moves across the whole range of the knob. It reshapes a break instead of levelling it, and brings the room up underneath the hits.

The vinyl sim sound

Vinyl sim is shorthand for a particular kind of squash — dense, slightly crushed drums with the room pushed up under the hits, the way a break sounds once it has been through a sampler. DRUGS goes at that sound directly, on the drum bus, with one knob and no setup.

How it works

• DOSE moves the transfer curve, the knee, the attack and the release together, the way a single hardware macro would.
• There is no threshold and no ratio, because there is no threshold in the model. The gain law is a lookup table, so the local ratio changes continuously with input level.
• Release is adaptive and has no user control. It reacts to the transient in front of it: a hit gets the shorter time, so gain recovers inside the gap where pump is audible, and sustained material gets the longer one, so it holds still rather than breathing.
• Auto-makeup is applied after the gain cell, so setting level cannot disturb the dynamics.
• MIX is dry/wet with zero latency anywhere in the path, so the dry signal stays sample-aligned with the wet one. Parallel compression does not comb-filter at any setting.
• LIMIT is a zero-latency soft ceiling at −0.3 dBFS on the output, with a clip indicator. It attenuates only, and is transparent below about −0.9 dBFS.

Formats and compatibility

DRUGS installs as an Audio Unit (AU) and a VST plug-in (VST3), plus a standalone application. It runs in Logic Pro, Ableton Live, Reaper, Cubase, Studio One, Bitwig and GarageBand.

macOS 10.13 or later, universal binary for both Apple Silicon and Intel. Zero samples of latency. Signed and notarised by Apple, so it installs without warnings. No internet connection required, ever.

Price

Pay what you want, $5 minimum.