The recent release by Plugin Alliance of Zip by Unfiltered Audio caught my attention because of the flexibility and unusual features I'd noticed when looking at the Unfiltered Audio G8 plug-in. In this video I look at five things which stand out to me as making Zip interesting to someone, like most of us, who already has more than enough compressor plug-ins.

No Modular Modulation

These five features are over and above the bewildering modulation possibilities offered by Unfiltered Audio Plug-ins. These five features are additions to the conventional features found on most compressors. They are:

1. Auto Threshold - Setting the correct threshold is fundamental to the compression process and while a soft knee helps accommodate variations in level, the auto threshold sets a threshold based on the incoming audio in an adaptive way.
2. Automatic Gain Compensation - While not as unusual as it used to be, this implementation offers a real time numeric display of the makeup gain being applied making the process transparent to the user.
3. Amplitude Modes - The stand out feature of this compressor, the sound of a compressor is so reliant on it's detector and Zip offers a variety of powerful options which vary the response far beyond what is possible with filters.
4. Expansion - designed with creative use in mind, the expansion features, when combined with the amplitude modes and the envelops styles, and the filtering and side chaining possibilities encourage experimentation.
5. Envelope Styles - With styles from "Quick" to "Goopy" these alternative settings can be used to tailor the time response of Zip to a similar extent as the Amplitude Modes can be used to tailor the detector.

Watch the free video to see these features in action.