So I followed this guide to get a compressor working in Tarkov. The point of this is to reduce the guns from being way too loud, which has the added benefit of footsteps being louder. It's mainly to protect your hearing.
It works great! But, I don't want to run the compressor all the time since it makes all of my other audio sound weird.
So how do we solve that? I'll tell ya, plus an extra goodie (separate channel compression)!
<aside> ℹ️ This guide assumes you have an Elgato StreamDeck. However, you can probably achieve the hotkey functionality by using something like AutoHotKey.
</aside>
<aside> ⚠️ Also, as of writing this, the links in that compressor guide have updated to where they have "VST 3" plugins. You want the VST 2 ones that have DLL files and not VST files. VST may work, but I haven't tried.
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To get started with the "toggle" functionality, we need to create copies of default configuration.
Just for reference, here is what my config looks like in Equalizer APO ("ns.txt" is an EQ, Noise Suppressor, and Compressor for my mic):
If we go to where the configs are located at C:\\Program Files\\EqualizerAPO\\config, we can see "config.txt". Here is what it looks like:
As you can see, disabled inclusions are just marked with a pound (#) symbol. If you were to remove them and save the file, you can hear it immediately update, which is perfect and the only reason this can work.
To start, make two new files in the Equalizer APO config directory, one named config_off.txt and the other config_on.txt. You can name these whatever you want, but I named them this for simplicity.
Inside each, you copy the config.txt contents and just change them to what you want to be. ON would have the pound symbols removed, OFF would have them added. For example, in my case:
Include: ns.txt
Include: tarkov-compressor_l.txt
Include: tarkov-compressor_r.txt
Include: ns.txt
# Include: tarkov-compressor_l.txt
# Include: tarkov-compressor_r.txt
Next, also inside the config directory, we will create two batch files. I named these _tarkov-off.bat and _tarkov-on.bat. These will copy the config_off.txt and config_on.txt files and overwrite the original config.txt file.
<aside>
ℹ️ I recommend opening a new notepad (each for a new file) since you can't create a batch file from the file explorer context menu and trying to rename a txt file won't work.
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Here are the contents: