Codec Crusher

Audio plug-in · VST3 / AU · macOS

Runs audio through real speech and music codecs, from Opus to Codec2, and turns their artefacts into an effect.

Overview

An VST effect passing audio through a selectable compression codec (Ous, Vorbis, Speex etc), with tunable paramaters to add intensity distortion and artifacts.

How it works

Codec Crusher encodes and decodes your audio in real time through one of eight real codecs, so what you hear is the codec's own damage rather than an imitation of it.

Opus: Bitrate, complexity, frame size from 2.5 to 60 ms, and bandwidth from narrowband to fullband.
Vorbis: Quality, lowpass and impulse bias.
MP3: Bitrates from 32 to 320 kbps, lowpass, and an offset to the encoder's hearing-threshold model.
Speex: Narrowband, wideband or ultra-wideband, with quality and complexity.
Codec2: The very-low-bitrate speech codec, from 3200 down to 700 bits per second.
G.711 μ-law and A-law, IMA ADPCM: The telephone-line and early-digital-audio companders.

Drive sets how hard the signal hits the codec, and Mix blends it with the dry signal, which is latency-compensated so the blend stays in phase while the codec buffers whole frames. The interface glows according to how far the processed signal has drifted from the original.