Is there a combined compressor/expander effect?

Is there a type of effect that compresses loud sounds and expands weak sounds to the same set level at the same time (basically a combined compressor and expander)?

It's not a REAPER FX but you can try this one: Very powerful, cheap and good quality compression algos. I own it.

Thanks alot! Will check it out.

usually its the makeup gain function of the compressor that is doing what you seem to be wanting. An expander is for making quieter sounds even quieter in relation to the louder ones

What I want is basically this: I have a guitar recording that is around -5db at its loudest and -20db at its softest (after some noise gate). I would like the entire recording to stay within -8-10db. So the loud parts need to be compressed and the soft parts need to be amplified, right? Or is there another sort of plugin that just squashes the dynamics to a set volume range?

the trick is, even though a compressor is meant to make loud sounds softer, the idea is often to do this in order to increase the overall level of the track. It seems counterintuitive, but the act of taking the peaks down means you can make the whole thing louder So many of the limiters out today have auto gain compensation, so that as you lower the threshold the volume of the output comes up. ReaComp has this feature as does JS Event Horizon. Give them a try together and youll see

Kjaerhus Classic Master Limiter should do the trick too. Knob goes down, peaks go down, average volume goes up.

You could try some parallel compression. Duplicate the track, squash the heck out it, add some eq to bring out the frequencies that lift the sound and cut some low end then mix in with the original. That way you'll have the original dynamics and hopefully a fuller sound.

OK, cool! I'll keep on trying things out.