V A L E N T I N E

Valentine is a compressor and distortion processor. It was inspired by the hyper compressed and crushed textures in the seminal Justice record, †. Using it is easy: turning input up makes the signal louder, more compressed, and more saturated. Turning crush up adds digital distortion.

The real fun is in processing signal with some ambience, be it a room or a reverb. With the right input gain and release settings, you can introduce pumping and breathing artifacts.

Though designed for aggressive (over) application, Valentine is flexible enough to use in a wide variety of applications. Try it today!

I stream and make videos about the development process on YouTube. I also wrote a few blog posts about it here.

Getting Valentine

Download the latest precompiled binaries here.

AU and VST3 on MacOs and VST3 on Windows are currently supported.

Using Valentine

Signal Path

Valentine is a non-linear processor. As such, knowing the signal path makes it easier to get your desired result. Here it is:

Crush -> Compress -> Saturate -> Soft Clip -> Output -> Mix

Parameters

• Crush: increases the amount of bit crushing. Downsamples the signal to 27.5kHz. Enabled using the Crush button.
• Compress: sets the gain applied to signal before compression. Use this to increase the amount of compression and distortion affecting the signal.
• Saturate: sets the amount of gain applied to signal before Valentine's waveshaper. Gain is compensated to prevent huge volume boost when you just want more dirt. Enabled using the Crush Enable Button.
• Ratio: sets the compression ratio. "Infinity" is more like 1000:1. Increasing this also increases threshold and decreases knee.
• Attack: sets compression attack time.
• Release: sets compression release time.
• Output: sets wet signal output gain before mix. Output clipping can be enabled with the Clip button.
• Mix: increases the amount of wet signal in the processor's output.
• Bypass: bypasses all processing.

Building Valentine

Xcode

Currently, Xcode 14.2 is supported for building Valentine.

Here's how to create an Xcode project for building the plugin.

git clone https://github.com/Tote-Bag-Labs/valentine.git
cd valentine
git submodule update --init --recursive
cmake -B builds -G Xcode

Other (for now)

If you'd rather just build it from the command line, run cmake --build Builds --config Release

Contributing to Valentine

If you'd like to get involved, take a look at issues. I could use help on anything marked bug or enhancement.

I'm currently not taking pull requests for new features.