Airwindows Compressors

Airwindows is Chris Johnson’s hand-coded plugin catalog, and it includes well over fifty free dynamics processors that don’t get the attention they deserve. The catch is that none of them have a GUI — Airwindows plugins ship as a list of generic parameter sliders inside your DAW’s plugin window, with the actual character described in the manual rather than shown on screen. For compressors specifically, two are worth installing first.

Pressure4 is a character compressor with an organic, slightly compressed feel that Chris explicitly says is not based on analog modeling. It still ends up sounding warm and full in a way that works well on drums, bass, and full mixes. Try it on a drum bus and resist the urge to add anything else. ButterComp is a smoother, more transparent design. It features four totally independent compressors per channel with a slow response, and the compression character is buttery — exactly as the name suggests.

Use it on mix buses and stereo groups where you want gentle, almost invisible leveling. These are easy plugins to overlook because the no-GUI presentation is jarring at first. But, they’re definitely worth the slight workflow friction. The full Airwindows catalog also has dozens of other dynamics tools, and the developer has spent twenty years refining them.