I often find a great synth sound but if I try to find a constant level that's loud enough it creates peaks that clip. I then have to lower the sound to prevent this happening or use a limiter. So far I've found Sir Elliot Mastering Limiter Series IV and ToneBoosters Barricade to be the most transparent.

What other recommendations are there for keeping the audio at a relatively constant level while preventing clipping? Any other plugins that won't alter the sound too much?

de la mancha clipstar,sixtyfive and/or crunchessor are great on individual tracks.Barricade for the master fader you got already!

First of all, I lower the output of the synthesiser in question in the VST host. Yeah, lots of VSTis behave like that. But just to make sure, I use a [free] clipping plugin from MGA called "Null clipper" and it's really not very CPU consuming, but hard to find... I suppose any limiter would do, actually.

You shouldn't use any clipping plugins on the output, or at least not "drive" them much, as that's the thing you do in the mastering.

Cheers!

Thanks for the suggestions. I went ahead and bought the de la Mancha plugs which work really well. I couldn't find Null Clipper unfortunately.

i keep things pretty low (peaking around 12db), so stuff hardly ever clips.

when playing live, i slap a GClip on top (set to 100% soft curve) just in case.

A second vote for keeping your mixes peaking low here. I think my stuff sounds so much better (but... err... still a bit crap ) now that I'm focusing on the mix itself rather than juggling elements of the mix in an attempt to get as close to 0dB as possible. If you render out at 24 bit, you've got a whole 48dB to boost things in the mastering stage (assuming you're totally 'in the box' and don't have a noise floor to worry about) before you start eating into the dynamic range your 16 bit final version offers (well, if you forget about the extra resolution dithering adds). I find my mixes peak at around -5 to -10dB, and that's usually just when the kick hits.

Keeping you levels low offers also gives your plug-in effects plenty of headroom to do their magic. Some plug-ins like distortions react very differently with different input levels, and you can do some nice soft-knee compression tricks by leaving plenty of headroom to set your threshold higher than the peaks among other things.