Direct Approach announced that all of their audio plugins are now freeware.
Direct Approach has unleashed its plugin suite of six individual plugins for free. The plugin suite is very much geared toward mixing and mastering. Out of the ten plugins, there is a little something for every sort of material.
There’s a lot to take in, so a brief overview is very much warranted.
SpecTrend is a spectral analyzer and utilizes pink noise weighting to help guide your EQing decisions. Metering is clear and clean on SpecTrend, and the interface is plenty easy to read.
Balancing mixes can be a daunting task sometimes, but this makes it easy to guess via the color coding of the frequency bands. Green equals an ideal level against the pink noise weighting, which helps to speed up workflow.
CompPlus is a compressor but goes a bit beyond your typical dynamic processors. Automatic automation writing brings it more in line with a vocal or bass rider. The action of the compressor itself is flexible. This comes despite a limited set of controls for the compressor’s envelope. It works especially well on vocals.
BoostX is a companion of sorts to CompPlus. It acts only on the quieter frequencies and can read and write automation as necessary for maintaining a constant level. It does work well on inconsistent vocals and guitar tracks, helping to even out uneven performances.
Snap and DASR have more individual purposes, affecting transients and de-essing respectively. Both can read and write automation like the others in the suite and do so transparently. Snap works quite well on lacking kicks and snare, adding so much-needed pop. DASR helps to remove some of the wash of the cymbals in a drum track.
LimitX rounds out the collection, featuring the same automatic read and write automation capabilities but applied towards a mastering context. You can certainly run it as a limiter for track groups, and it works quite well for catching overages.
Direct Approach is available for Windows and Mac computers and supports a good variety of plugin formats. Windows users have the option of VST2, VST3, and AAX for 64-bit clients only. Mac producers can use VST2, VST3, AAX, and AU. There is no stated intent for Silicon support, unfortunately.
Download: Direct Approach
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10 Comments
alex
onThese are actually very nice :) Simple tools that get the job done and they do that really transparently. I have Hornet AutoGain Pro and the best free gain rider that I know is Blue Lab Audio Auto Gain and they’re both harder to set than CompPlus and after the quick test I’m pretty sure that they can’t get as good results as CompPlus. This is a really good one and so is BoostX. DASR is really transparent and great for light to moderate de-essing (for more control I’d still chose TB Sibalance over it). Snap and LimitX also do a really nice job. Anyways, this is a really useful bundle and a pleasant surprise (TBH, I almost didn’t download it but now I’m glad I did:)).
Tomislav Zlatic
onThanks for the comparison!
Darryl Lim
onThanks for the comparison review Alex! I was in the middle of hunting for a good free auto-gain/rider. :)
Matthew B. Carter
onExcite Audio – Lifeline Console Lite ($50) is available for free at PluginBoutique (thanks to Attack Magazine I think?), by using the coupon code “Attack0123” (without quotes) at checkout!
Check it out!
Tomislav Zlatic
onThank you!
Michal Ochedowski
onExcellent news and a great share. Thank you.
Jesper Rangemo
on:)
Richard
onThanks Matthew
Jeffrey Price
on“Check it out!” Thanks to you I did! :)
Animus
onThe automation writing capability is super interesting and I wonder why more plugins don’t implement such things. However, there ends up being lots of stair-step type automation with sudden jumps, rather than smooth ramps, which seems… not ideal as general behavior.