If you're looking for the popular and free RoughRider 3 compressor, you've come to the right place! However, due to a series of events that, in retrospect, would be funny if it wasn't so annoying, we had to move it behind what is, for all intents and purposes, a paywall. 

The actual story is so dumb to relate that we'd be embarrassed actually putting you through the chore of reading it. But the tl;dr version is thus: some YouTube gamer put up a video showing that a particular game would be easier to play if one could hear footsteps better. He came up with a scaffolding of freeware to pull this off. Unfortunately, the game in question has about ten times the players as the entire music industry has people in it, so our support has been swamped for literal years trying to explain to folks who are not now, nor will ever be, musicians how to use a compressor.

It was bearable for a while, but as is the way of things, technology moves on. The freeware host in question is VST2, and as any regular user of plugins knows, that format was deprecated some years ago. So these folks, in addition to being fairly in the dark about what compressors are and how plugins work, are looking for something that is no longer a viable product. 

We tried any number of things, up to and including being rude, to no avail. (In point of fact, we still regularly get visitors to our Discord asking for it.) At the end of the day, we decided the easiest thing would be to remove it from the free page. 

So, the upshot: RoughRider 3 is still available and supported, and will continue to be fore the foreseeable future. However, you will only find it on our site if you've made a purchase; you'll see it at the bottom of your account page. Since this is the Internet, there are many other places to find the exact version you'll need. But we're a very small company, and are not equipped, mentally or physically, to provide infinite support to tens of thousands of gamers. This is not what our products are about; we make things for and as musicians. Sorry if this inconveniences you, but life can be like that.

- Chris Randall 
- Bellows Falls, VT