I took something out if it, but your whole post where this is coming from is really nice. Thanks for that!

But do you maybe know what exactly the differences are between a transient shaper and a compressor? The only difference that I can think of is that by a transient shaper all the transients can be affected, while a compressor is triggered by a threshold so it will only work on a certain volume. Not sure if I am right. But still are they not kinda doing the same things? Controlling the transients? Or in what situations are transient shapers good for compared to compressors?

Not sure if this will answer your question or if this is what you mean, but I was thinking to something like FabFilter Pro-C2.

 

Use your ears, not charts!

 

Manic Compressor does this. It has a graph that kind of shows what happens to transients and valleys in the audio material in real time. It helps get a hold on what a compressor does and what to look for when inserting one, and it sounds cool.

This is actually harder done than said. When compressors don't make much sense to you, there's a plethora of changes co-occurring; then it's hard to actually tune your ear to the specific changes. The way I started to understand compression (not done yet) was to use the simplest of all: the LA2A (input knob, output knob, and compression/limit switch). Once you tune your ear to that a LA2A does, you can start to learn one other compressor type, adding in complexity.

 

Yes, Manic Compressor and many others have some form of visual analyzer. However, his question was whether there's an analyzer that can show the similar 'before and after' type results for a plugin that has no built in display. In that case, the only way to get a visual pre-post comparison is to place an analyzer before and after the plugin.