mfkne has released PUNCHDUST, a character dynamics and texture plugin for macOS and Windows, free to download.
PUNCHDUST works on three coupled ideas at once. PUNCH drags the attack forward through a dual-stage transient shaper into a soft clipper at 2x oversampling, using a 97-tap linear-phase half-band filter so the boosted highs stay clean instead of aliasing. DUST trails a blend of 5-bit rasterized digital crackle and warm analog hiss into the decay, driven by dual peak followers, so it only opens in the gaps where the source falls away. SQUEEZE is parallel upward compression that lifts low-level sustain by up to 26 dB with transients excluded, while automatic gain compensation locks the peaks to unity. TILT is a balance filter around 700 Hz that works on the wet difference alone, which turns it into a true bypass when PUNCH and SQUEEZE sit at zero.
A single detector pass per sample on the mono sum drives all of it, which keeps the stereo image intact. The engine runs 48 samples ahead, 1.0 ms at 48 kHz, and reports that latency to the host. What the plugin adds is strictly the difference between the processed and the dry signal, so the source itself is never filtered or compressed.
Hard-wired behind the four controls: a noise gate ahead of the texture delay, a 15 Hz subsonic filter on the wet path and a master safety soft clipper.
PUNCHDUST is a VST3 effect for macOS (Universal Binary, Apple Silicon and Intel) and Windows (64-bit).
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