Mantis Vex DOOM comp

A VST3 / Standalone audio plugin recreating Mick Gordon's infamous "DOOM Compressor" — the extreme upward compressor he built in Reaktor for the DOOM (2016) soundtrack. Instead of taming peaks, it drags everything — reverb tails, noise floor, artifacts — up to 0 dBFS. Slam it on a single patch (ideally with reverb printed in front of it) and boring sounds turn into dense, distorted walls of doom. See INTEL.md for the research behind it.

Built with JUCE (pulled automatically via CMake FetchContent).

▶ Download the latest release (Windows x64 VST3).

Controls

Knob	What it does
Floor	How far down it reaches to grab signal — the "-200 dB" knob. Lower = more noise floor dragged up = more doom.
Ceiling	The target level the upward comp pulls toward. 0 dB = full doom.
Amount	How fully it normalizes (the ratio). 100% = total flatten.
Attack	Envelope attack. 0 ms = glitchy / dirty.
Release	How fast the tail blooms after a note releases.
Drive	Pushes the lifted signal into saturation.
Crush	Blend of soft-clip (tanh) for dense, distorted texture.
Output	Output trim / makeup.
Mix	Dry/wet parallel blend — tame the destruction when you want.

The LIFT meter shows how hard the compressor is currently pulling the signal up.

Build

Requirements: CMake 3.22+, a C++17 compiler (MSVC / Visual Studio 2022 on Windows), and an internet connection on first configure (to fetch JUCE).

cmake -B build -G "Visual Studio 17 2022" -A x64
cmake --build build --config Release

On Windows the VST3 is auto-copied to %COMMONPROGRAMFILES%\VST3\DOOM Compressor.vst3 after a successful build (COPY_PLUGIN_AFTER_BUILD). A Standalone app is also produced for quick testing.

Layout

CMakeLists.txt          build config + JUCE fetch
Source/
  DoomCompressor.h      the DSP core (upward-compression engine)
  PluginProcessor.*     JUCE processor, parameters, state
  PluginEditor.*        custom Mantis Vex UI + LIFT / GR meters
Assets/                 embedded cover art, logo, brand fonts
INTEL.md                reverse-engineering notes

License

The source code is released under the MIT License © 2026 Mantis Vex.

The plugin links JUCE (fetched at build time, used here under its GPLv3 / open-source terms) and embeds the fonts Orbitron and Share Tech Mono, both under the SIL Open Font License.

The Mantis Vex artwork, logo/avatar, and album cover (Assets/bg_craves.jpg, Assets/logo_yt.jpg) are © Mantis Vex and remain the artist's property — they are included for use in this plugin and are not covered by the MIT grant above.