FabFilter Pro-C 3 - Compressor Plug-In

Incredible sound and character

FabFilter Pro-C 3 is a high-quality compressor plug-in for the most demanding engineers. Whether you need subtle mastering compression, an upfront lead vocal, that magic drum glue or deep EDM pumping: Pro-C 3 gets the job done with style.

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The way the Pro-C shows you the compression is ingenious. All of the FabFilter plug-ins seem to be designed to be simple to use and easy to get results while sounding incredible.

— Tony Maserati (Grammy Award-winning engineer/producer)

Everything you need

Pro-C 3 offers 14 different, program-dependent compression styles and various character modes to introduce smooth saturation, vintage color and analog drift. But there's more! You also get full immersive / Dolby Atmos® functionality (up to 9.1.6), up to 32x oversampling, unique auto-threshold, intelligent auto-gain and auto-release, a variable knee and hold, smooth lookahead external side-chain and host tempo sync triggering, variable stereo linking and mid/side processing, all packed in a beautifully designed user interface.

Beautiful interface and optimized workflow

The fully redesigned interface in FabFilter Pro-C 3 offers insightful metering with real-time displays that will greatly improve workflow. The large animated level/knee display visualizes exactly when, why and how compression is applied to incoming audio. Accurate level meters show the exact peak and loudness values, while the circular side-chain input meter turns finding the perfect threshold setting into a trivial task. And the large side-chain EQ controller makes it easier than ever to filter the trigger signal any way you like.

FabFilter goodies

Of course, you also get all the usual FabFilter goodies: perfectly tuned knobs, a modern preset browser to easily navigate the carefully designed factory presets, interactive MIDI Learn, undo/redo and A/B switch, Smart Parameter Interpolation for smooth parameter transitions, an extensive help file with interactive help hints, sample-accurate automation, advanced optimization and much more.

Instance List

A modular channel strip

Control all of your Pro-Q 4, Pro-C 3, Pro-DS and Pro-G instances in one convenient overview: the instance list in Pro-Q 4.

You will discover this to be a huge time-saver, making it much easier to dial in initial settings for all plug-ins when starting your mix session.

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Character and coloration

Drive your sound

The new character panel brings Pro-C 3 to life through carefully designed analog saturation, coloring and drift, including customizable drive and pre/post-compression routing settings.

Pro-C 3's style and character options let you combine a wide range of compressor flavors with different types of analog coloring. With Pro-C 3, you don't just get one compressor, you get dozens!

Side Chain

In-depth side chaining

Add up to 6 EQ bands with all shapes from Pro-Q 4, including all-pass and brickwall filters. Optionally, bands can only target the mid- or side signal.

You can also choose to let the compressor trigger on the external side chain signal, MIDI or to a host-tempo-synched pulse.

Last but not least, Pro-C 3 offers variable channel linking, including M/S processing.

Pro-C 2 is set to become a staple of many professionals' toolkits. Everyone needs a good compressor, and there are few as good as this. A future classic. Verdict: 10/10!

— MusicTech Magazine

Awards

Image of Electronic Musician Editor's Choice Award 2016

Image of Computer Music Expert's Choice Award 2015

Image of Computer Music Innovation Award

Image of Computer Music Performance Award

Image of Producer Spot Pro-C Review Award

Image of KVR Reader's Choice Awards Favorite Dynamics

Key features

improved Fourteen different compression styles, of which six are new in version 3: Versatile, Smooth, Vari-Mu, El-Op, Upward and TTM (To The Max)
improved Gorgeous Retina interface, with (optional) animated level knee displays and accurate peak/loudness metering
new Character modes: carefully designed analog saturation, coloring and drift bring Pro-C 3 to life with customizable Drive and Pre/Post-compression routing settings
Full Screen mode, offering a large level display and side-chain EQ controller
new Introducing host tempo triggering, with customizable sync, offset and pulse length settings
new Auto Threshold: Make the threshold knob level-independent — very useful for dialog processing
new Pro-C 3 instances can now be controlled via the Instance List in Pro-Q 4, together with Pro-G and Pro-DS
new Full immersive / Dolby Atmos® functionality (up to 9.1.6), with customizable channel/stereo linking
Mix setting, which scales the gain change from 0% to 200%
improved Side-chain EQ section: add or remove up to 6 bands of any shapes, including brickwall or all-pass filters, and mid- or side-only EQ'ing per band
new New-style preset browser, with easy search, tags and meta data
Accurate, large level and gain change meters, with peak and loudness level visualization (complying with the Momentary mode of the EBU R128 / ITU-R 1770 standards)
improved Up to 32x oversampling

Program-dependent attack and release curves
improved Smooth lookahead (optional, up to 20 ms), now with a customizable maximum between 0 and 20 ms, to finetune latency versus needed lookahead
Retina support on macOS and High DPI support on Windows
Intelligent Auto Gain
External side chain triggering
Hold (up to 500 ms)
GPU-powered graphics acceleration
Custom knee, variable from hard knee to a 72 dB soft knee (to enable saturation-like effects)
Auto Release
improved Optional MIDI triggering
Super-fast attack times
Supports common Pro Tools hardware control surfaces
MIDI Learn
Variable stereo linking and mid/side processing, with mid-only, side-only, Mid-to-side and Side-to-Mid processing
Range setting, which limits the maximum applied gain change
Undo/redo and A/B comparison
Audition Triggering option, which enables users to hear on which parts of the audio Pro-C 3 is triggering and how much compression is taking place
Smart Parameter Interpolation
improved Multiple interface sizes: Compact, Small, Medium and Large
Sample-accurate automation of all parameters
Extensive help file with interactive help hints
Available in VST, VST3, Audio Units, CLAP, AAX Native and AudioSuite formats (all both 64-bit and 32-bit)