FL Studio compressor guide: Fruity Limiter, Fruity Compressor and Maximus

FL Studio's most complete compressor is the COMP tab of Fruity Limiter. Fruity Compressor is simpler, and Maximus compresses in three bands. This guide gives every control with its range from Image-Line's manual, a method to compress a track, and a way to check in numbers what the compression changed.

Which compressor should you use in FL Studio?

Start with Fruity Limiter on its COMP tab: it's the compressor Image-Line's manual recommends. Fruity Compressor is fine for a quick setting and has a sidechain input since FL Studio 2025.2. Maximus compresses by frequency band.

Fruity Limiter and Fruity Compressor come with every edition of FL Studio. Maximus needs Producer Edition or higher, according to both the manual and Image-Line's editions page (checked November 9, 2026). Two more tools exist: Fruity Multiband Compressor, and Transmitter (added in FL Studio 2026, All Plugins Edition), which splits a sound's transient and sustain so you can process them separately.

What threshold, ratio, attack and release do

A compressor turns a sound down when it goes over a threshold. The ranges below are Fruity Compressor's, as listed in its manual page.

Below 1:1, the ratio stops compressing and expands instead: sound above the threshold gets louder.

The knee sets how gently compression starts. With Hard, gain reduction kicks in all at once at the threshold. With Soft, it builds up over 15 dB around it.

How to set Fruity Limiter as a compressor

Fruity Limiter combines a compressor, a limiter and a noise gate. To use it as a compressor:

1. Load Fruity Limiter into a slot on the Mixer track (F9 opens the Mixer).
2. Switch to the COMP tab.
3. Lower THRESH below the track's peaks. At its maximum (0 dB), the compressor does nothing.
4. Raise RATIO to set the amount of reduction, and KNEE for how gently it starts.
5. Set ATT (attack) and REL (release). The manual warns that a release that is too short can distort.
6. Set SUSTAIN, the window for measuring average level, from 0 to 1,000 ms, and CURVE, the response shape, from 1 (immediate) to 8 (slow).
7. Make up the lost level with GAIN, which sits after the compressor and before the limiter.

The limiter stays active behind the compressor. If you only want compression, raise CEIL on the LIMIT tab to its maximum (+12 dB) and the limiter will barely act.

The display shows input peaks in purple and output peaks in green, the analysis envelope in blue and the gain envelope in white. The level markers use the same colors: GAIN purple, CEIL green, THRESH blue. The "0.2 dB compressor safety" option adds 0.2 dB of headroom to the compressor to help avoid peaks over 0 dB.

One detail most tutorials leave out: Fruity Limiter's compressor reacts to average (RMS) level, and its limiter to peaks. To catch the attack of a snare, the limiter, or a very short SUSTAIN, responds fastest.

Fruity Compressor: the quick option (now with sidechain)

Fruity Compressor has six controls: Threshold, Ratio, Gain, Attack, Release and Type. The manual calls it a legacy plugin and points to Fruity Limiter instead. It's still handy when you want to set a track in a few seconds.

The "/R" types (Hard/R, Medium/R, Vintage/R, Soft/R) turn on TCR (Transient Controlled Release). Release then adapts in real time to transients, which cuts down on pumping.

Since FL Studio 2025.2 (November 25, 2025), Fruity Compressor has a sidechain input. The Sidechain Input selector only lists a source once a sidechain route exists in the Mixer, except on the Master, where every track is listed. The guide on how to sidechain with Fruity Limiter walks through that route.

Parallel compression without phase issues

Parallel compression blends the original sound with a heavily compressed copy. Transients stay intact and the body of the sound gets louder.

1. Route a send from the track (or the drum bus) to a free Mixer track.
2. On that track, load a compressor set hard: low threshold, high ratio.
3. Bring up the compressed track's fader until you hear the body of the sound without losing the transients.

The Fruity Limiter trap: the limiter's attack adds look-ahead, which means latency. The compressed copy arrives late against the original, and the blend loses low end or top end through phase cancellation. The manual gives two fixes: set the limiter attack to 0 ms, or turn on "Plugin delay compensation > Automatic" in the Mixer menu.

Maximus: multiband compression

Maximus splits the sound into three bands (Low, Mid, High) and adds an overall Master compressor, four compressors in all. Each band has its own saturation, stereo separation and adjustable look-ahead. It also works as a noise gate, expander, ducker or de-esser.

It's built for mastering and buses. The manual itself urges restraint: used sparingly, Maximus raises the volume without unwanted distortion. This guide gives no numbers for Maximus settings; they depend too much on the song to copy as is.

Check what the compression changed

Two checks do the job: compare at matched level, then read the crest factor.

Compare at matched level. A compressed track with makeup gain often sounds louder, and ears prefer louder. In Fruity Limiter, save the starting point with "Store in spare state", make your changes, match the level with GAIN, then switch with "Flip with spare state".

Read the crest factor. It's the gap, in dB, between a sound's peak and its average level. A compressor shrinks it. If it barely moved, the compressor is barely working. If it collapsed, the track has lost its transients. In Fruity Limiter, the gap between input peaks (purple) and output peaks (green) gives a first idea. For numbers, Fruity dB Meter shows the peak in dB when you hover over it, and Wave Candy in Meter mode measures RMS over 300 ms; according to the manual, no FL tool shows both as numbers side by side.

The manual also notes that a compressor pushed into saturation adds distortion in the high end.

Fern measures the crest factor of your Mixer tracks from a single instance on the Master. It's a mixing assistant that reads up to 125 tracks from the Master. It suggests settings as a card, so you can audition a proposed setting before you apply it by switching between A (current mix) and B (proposal), then apply or reject it. In YOLO mode, it can also try a setting against the current state for about 15 seconds and report the measured differences, on FL Studio's own plugins only.

For vocals, the vocal guide shows how to compress a vocal in FL Studio. The other guides are in the guides hub.

FAQ

Fruity Limiter or Fruity Compressor?

Fruity Limiter, on its COMP tab, has more controls (SUSTAIN, CURVE, KNEE), a gain reduction display and a limiter behind it, and the manual recommends it. Fruity Compressor is faster to set with six controls, and takes a sidechain since FL Studio 2025.2.

Should I compress the master bus?

You don't have to. Light compression on the Master can glue tracks together, but it reacts to the whole mix at once: a loud kick will pull everything else down. Set your tracks first, then compare the Master with and without the compressor at matched level.