make sure youre using high quality monitors, over the heads, in ears, or desk ones

also make sure to listen at a very comfortable listening level

Although good monitors, etc, are nice, I (mostly) use old iPhone earbuds and do just fine.

The best advice I got for making progress when I was struggling with this in the beginning is to listen for the volume difference between the kick and the snare. Try it. The more compressed example will have them more equal in volume. Once somebody on here pointed that out to me, I passed through several levels without a single error in no time.

Apart from that, slowly but surely, I have felt my feel for attack and release times get much better. I think that just takes time.

Thanks for the tips, much appreciated!

I know that when I started I had precisely the wrong intuition about compression. What I was missing was that the attack time is short in these example so higher compression makes the sound kind of mushier and more reverberant. This confused me because I was used to using compression with a longer attack time which makes the sound punchier. This meant that until I took this into account I tended to get things precisely the wrong way round.

Normally you can tell by which one has the most dynamic range. That would be the less compressed of the two.

in this exercise, the compressor applied has a fast attack, so a tip is to choose the sound that is smoother. Pay attention to louder elements in the mix (kick drum, loud tom) as these are the ones triggering the compressor, then check which one is less aggressive - the smoother one is the compressed one.

Thank you everyone for these tips, I have been struggling with Dr. Compressor too. I've been doing much better with Compressionist with attack and release questions, but still struggle with ratio there too. I also think half of the time in Compressionist I am responding to overall timbre, and not focusing on attack or release, so I often wonder if I am doing it wrong.

Thanks for all the tips I just beat level one for the first time 😃

At higher levels you need to listen for both the hit of the transients (mostly kicks and snares) but also listen for the low end coming up from the ride cymbals.

If you get better at DB King first, it would be much easier to hear those volume differences. And even just volume balancing you're own music with tiny differences in db will help alot.

the compressed sound sounds more ambient (further back) and the transients are less pronounced (further back-i,e not as in your face as the non compressed transients)

Compressed: 1. The snare has a tiny bit more release and saturation 2. You can hear more reverb. I never played with percussions, they suck :D

Listen for a lightly longer tail on the kick drum or the snare (kind of like reverb). This should get you started. Turn your volume up a little bit to hear the tail.