Goodhertz VCME 3

It’s billed as a ‘mastering’ compressor, but VCME 3 is way more versatile than that.

Another day, yet another compressor? We all have choice aplenty when it comes to compressor plug‑ins, but Goodhertz’s Vulf Compressor Mastering Edition (VCME for short) is usefully different, and if your compression needs go beyond the basic, it’s well worth checking out. As the name implies, some facilities are aimed at mastering, but VCME has plenty of potential when mixing, whether on individual sources, subgroups or the master bus. Now at v3 (this is my first encounter with it), VCME supports the usual Mac and Windows plug‑in formats, and channel counts ranging from mono right up to 9.1.6.

Main Features

The main screen shows the extended GUI, with a soft clipper limiter/saturation facility in an Advanced Settings pane on the right, which is hidden by default. (You can install this soft clipper as a separate plug‑in too.) There are a couple of alternative views in this Advanced panel, which I’ll come back to later. Meanwhile, the left pane hosts something looking more like a conventional compressor, albeit with a distinctive‑looking GUI (you can change the red on white livery to white and red on black, if you prefer).

On this compressor pane are the usual threshold, ratio, attack, release and make‑up gain parameters and, beneath, a wet/dry mix slider. All have stepped settings — something that’s very common on mastering hardware, as it makes channel matching precise and facilitates reliable A/B comparison of settings and precision recall. By default, the steps are very fine (eg. 0.5dB steps for the threshold) but there’s an option for coarser granularity (the threshold’s individual steps become 3dB).

Not only is the current amount of compression shown on a virtual needle meter and a numerical readout, but there’s also a history plot displaying overall gain reduction post the dry/wet mix control. There’s also a neat semi‑automatic threshold and make‑up gain facility: as you set each manually, you’re always in full control, but next to both parameters’ sliders an arrow can appear to suggest a suitable ballpark setting. For example, if you leave the threshold at 0dBFS, the arrow will indicate roughly where to put the threshold so the changing signal level triggers a broadly sensible amount of gain reduction. You can work the same way with the make‑up gain slider, but this parameter is also joined by a continuously updated numeric readout of the variance between the dry and wet signal levels. Hit Apply, and the make‑up gain is automatically adjusted to compensate for the difference. You don’t always need to match the levels before/after compression, of course, but it can be invaluable when you want to A/B compare different processors, or the compressed signal with that...