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I was looking for an effect I used several years ago in Cool Edit Pro. But I'd like it now on my Mac as plugin for Audacity or GarageBand or a standalone app, if it exists. I would say it's a fairly common thing, but I can't find it anywhere. Let me explain.

If you have a sound and use a compressor on it, you often get a simple chart. You know, a line coming from bottom left, going to top right. Somewhere along the way is an adjustable line, you can set the dB here at which compression starts. So the diagonal is coming from bottom left, goes to the adjustable dB line relatively steep and from there, when compressing, it moves on to top right in a less steep line.

Now what I'm looking for gives much MUCH more control to this. It is similar to Photoshop or GIMP's 'Curves' or 'Levels' effect, where you can set a curve to adjust the brightness of specific colours (see image). Except of course I want this to work on sound.
http://www.postimage.org/Ts1eZsb9.jpg
('Curves' in GIMP)

So when you use it, you can more easily make soft sounds louder and loud sounds softer or everything softer, but loud sounds less than soft sounds.

As I mentioned, it exists in Cool Edit Pro, but that's so long ago, I don't remember what it was called. Besides, I can't run it on my Mac anyway. So I was wondering if anybody knows if this also exists in Audacity or GarageBand or something. Anybody has any idea?

Thanks in advance!

Thanks for the tip. I think it's not really what I'm looking for, but I will ask on their forums, so also thanks for pointing me to the site.
I think this isn't what I'm looking for because it's only a Win plugin, can't get it on Mac. And it looks like a multiband processor (with 32 bands). If you look at that screenshot, the x-axis shows frequencies. For what I'm looking for, that would need to be dB. And the y-axis also needs to be dB. So I can say, for example, ok, everything that's at -10dB right now should become -15dB and everything that's now -30dB should be -20dB.
I've used this in the past in Cool Edit to compress a live recording of a performing band, to tone down the drums and bring up the vocals. It worked rather well.

VST Plugin; Dynamics Processing ?
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Audition/3.0/images/ef16.png

Yup, you are def. looking for a "Compressor". But you want one where you can draw the transfer curve, thus being able to use it as compressor, expander, noise gate, etc etc.

Doing a quick google shows that there aren't that many dynamics processors anymore that let you draw the curve yourself. I think this is because most compressors don't just use the ratio/makeup/knee settings for more things than to just calculate the curve.

I think you best have a long look at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression and everything will make a lot more sense.

- Bram

Thanks so far everybody
I found one, but it's for the wrong operating system (wrong in more ways than one ) and a VST plugin, which I don't think I can use (well, I do believe Audacity has support for some VST plugins, but so far most I ever tried failed). So the search continues.
But if anybody's interested, it's the MCompressor.

hi, check out the Sonnox Oxford Dynamics VST

http://www.musictechmag.co.uk/files/Images/Page%20Views/MTM51/400/Dynamics_400.jpg