Developer Analog Obsession is back with its latest release – Attractor, a dynamic processor with transient manipulation for Mac and Windows (VST3/AU/AAX).
Analog Obsession has released a swathe of free plugins in the last couple of years, gaining a solid reputation among both professionals and hobbyists in the audio community.
The developer is perhaps best known for creating emulations of classic analogue gear, in addition to creating original designs like the Cite exciter, ReLife mix bus sweetener and transient-based randomizer Realizer plugins.
Sometimes you want a different kind of control over your dynamics than your run-of-the-mill compressor can provide: enter the transient shaper.
Attractor splits the incoming audio into two paths which lets you treat the attack and release of the sound source separately.
Perhaps you want to bring out certain details of a drum groove without creating boomy sustain, or maybe you need to expand just the pick attack of a guitar during a solo.
It could thus both be a surgical tool for certain specific mixing tasks or an experimental tool to blow up and completely destroy a sound by isolating parts of the signal and applying processing to it.
The plugin boasts a low and high shelf EQ at 120 Hz and 8 KHz respectively, compression and saturation with auto-gain as well as a volume knob on each channel. These are routed to a global mix knob and master output to let you blend in your chosen amount of processing and control the overall level.
Like some of his other recent offerings, Attractor does not include oversampling. The developer said that his implementation failed, which is a shame. Oversampling and anti-derivative anti-aliasing should come to be an expected feature for non-linear processes like saturation and compression.
Plugins like Attractor, which has several stages of non-linearity, could cause disagreeable aliasing and intermodulation distortion that could cause problems further down in your mix.
Implementing basic linear-phase oversampling doesn’t seem like too big of an ask, but the plugin is free after all.
A possible improvement to the functionality of Attractor would be letting the user control the timing of the split between transient and sustain as well.
All things considered, Attractor is a handy tool and a good-sounding addition to the Analog Obsession arsenal.
Download: Attractor (FREE)
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