Aberrant DSP ShapeShifter Review at Gearspace.com

An update on ShapeShifter. Version 1.1 is now available which adds features to the preset manager, and for anyone who wants to try before you buy, a demo version is now available! The demo is fully featured, but has a brief (< 1 sec) sound drop-out every 45 seconds and cannot save custom user presets. Now back to the review...

Aberrant DSP introduced SketchCassette about a year ago, a wonderful lo-fi processor that emulates some “defects” of the venerable cassette tape recorder. It evolved from a university senior design project and impressed me with its capability, flexibility and humorous, yet functional GUI. Now the designers, Ben and Dan, have released ShapeShifter, a unique take on the compressor, which goes even further from a skeuomorphic GUI than SketchCassette yet retains a very user friendly, easy to use interface. And as with their first processor, they are practically giving it away.

Pros

• Fabulous FX from subtle analogue treatment to far-out trashy.
• Excellent preset system with loads of factory examples.
• Dual-mono capability as well as balanced left-right compression.
• Unique downward and upward compression mode with relative level control.
• Great on full mixes, drum buses, bass, vocals, guitars and other instrument tracks and buses.
• Low cpu requirements and zero latency.
• Easy installation and authorization.
• Very convenient one-click access to the pdf user manual.
• Very low cost. Like v-e-r-y low. Extremely high value for money.

Cons

• Nothing to really complain about. Although one might wish for a loudness compensating bypass, I didn’t find this a problem in use as described earlier.

Read the full review at Gearspace.com