Not only is vocal mixing a significant part of producing a song, but it can also be pretty tricky if you do not know what you’re doing. It’s designed to allow engineers to stay creative while handling all of the true peak compliance for different formats.18.4 What Effects Does REAPER Have? Vocal Effects For REAPER Nugen’s ISL is a precision true peak limiter for mixing, mastering, post-production, and broadcast. Apart from limiting and maximizing levels, the L1 can also re-quantize for all bit depths to enhance the resolution of the output. Waves’s iconic L1 has been an industry standard for nearly three decades since its inception in 1994. Oxford Limiter is another excellent true peak limiter providing maximum loudness, density, and presence, while still being transparent enough to not ruin a mix’s character. It also boasts a wide variety of metering options depending on the specs you’re mixing or mastering to. Pro-L2 is an industry-leading true peak limiter with all the loudness and transparency you could want. You can use this as end-stage level control, or even as a harmonic saturation effect. The result is even more transparent process, which is why mastering engineers will often reach for a peak clipper. Best PAID Limiter Plugins T-RackS Classic ClipperĬlassic Clipper uses peak clipping to tame peaks as opposed to peak limiting. The original character of the mix should remain intact, even at the highest levels of compression. LoudMax is designed as a brickwall loudness maximizer that’s supposed to be as clean and transparent as possible. Overall, Unlimited is balanced in its ability to achieve extra loudness without audible distortion or squash. It even includes specific loudness metering for post-production purposes. Unlimited is a limiter and loudness maximizer for stereo and 5.1 surround. Certain features, like frequency-specific limiting, are paid-only, but the free version has plenty to play with. This is a clipping style limiter for subtle and transparent dynamic control to hard clipping distortion. It also has M/S and multiband modes, making it ideal for mastering and detail-oriented limiting. Limiter No.6 is an incredibly versatile free plugin, offering different styles of limiting including peak, true peak, clipping, and even high-frequency limiting. It has input and output gain, a threshold, and a release, as well as a resizable GUI and some handy presets to get up and running fast. The free limiter by Kilohearts is a really simple and easy-to-use plugin. Best FREE Limiter Plugins Kilohearts Limiter A quality true peak limiter can help you rest assured that no clipping is getting past your mix bus. The regular meters in our DAW won’t show us these, but a true peak limiter/meter can. What happens during this process is that the analog reconstruction can actually peak beyond the digital sample values in the DAW-these are the true peaks. True peak limiters account for the D/A process, when the recordings in our DAW get converted back to analog for playback. When the signal surpasses the ceiling, it runs into a brick wall, and is unable to go beyond that value. You balance the input signal against the ceiling, possibly increasing overall level, while trying not to push the limiter too hard. This is normally somewhere between -1 and -0.1 dBFS. Essentially, you set the ceiling value which the absolute highest you want your signal to peak. The most common type of limiter is what we call the brickwall limiter. Pushing a limiter too hard at the end can sometimes sound crappy. If it sounds good it is good, but more experienced engineers prefer to boost loudness and perceived loudness as much as possible before the mix bus, on individual elements and groups. One way engineers like to use a limiter is to increase the overall loudness of a mix at the very end, but whether that’s the best use of them is debatable. Usually, though, we talk about limiting the mix bus, and limiter plugins universally round out a mastering chain. Limiters tend to be used on buses, such as a vocal bus where performances can sometimes peak wildly. They also do this transparently, whereas compressors can be colorful.
But instead of processing the entire signal like a regular compressor, a limiter’s primary job is to prevent signals from going past a chosen ceiling. The general consensus defines a limiter as a compressor with a ratio of at least 10:1, going all the way to infinity.