Pressure

Pressure is a special little plugin that helped Airwindows get launched. It’s a vari-mu compressor algorithm, meaning that it kicks in harder if the input is hotter.

The thing about Pressure is this: though I spent years making it more sophisticated, I’ve also spent years learning the power of very simple algorithms. Pressure’s a very simple plugin. You can’t even easily adjust it: there’s no specific distinction between attack and release, no way to adapt it to varying sample rates, none of the modern amenities and yet the tone of this little thing has won over some amazing golden ears. It’s unusually clean around 10K, despite having nothing in particular to fix aliasing problems. Sometimes it’s hard to improve a simple thing by making it more complicated…

If you’re looking for an Airwindows compressor, I strongly recommend checking out not just the successors to this plugin, but the original Pressure itself. It’s 64 bit/32 bit/PPC Audio Unit like everything else, so it should run on everything—and it’s probably the best Airwindows example of a ‘magic plugin’ which could not be improved on, just changed into different things in its evolution.