Image Line has released Maximus, a pristine quality Mastering Maximizer, and more. It's also a Limiter, Compressor, Noise Gate, Expander, Ducker and De-esser. Maximus excels equally well as a final mastering plugin or as a per-track effect. Maximus applies level maximization via compression and/or limiting across three frequency bands, to enhance and improve the final track.

Used sparingly, Maximus raises the volume of the track without introducing unwanted distortion and ensures that the quieter parts, often lost in the mix, are more easily heard. Bass can be increased and higher frequencies sharpened. Selected elements of a mix, instruments or vocals for example, or complete tracks are given a professionally mastered 'presence'.

Key features:

• 3 independent user-definable Low Mid High (LMH) frequency bands.
• Custom look-ahead for the LMH bands and Master compression envelopes.
• 4 compressors/limiter: One per LMH band plus a Master wide band compressor/limiter.
• Each compressor has an infinitely variable, multipoint compression curve. Create any shaped knee or special effects (limiting, compression, gating or expansion).
• Fully configurable. Any of the LMH or Master compressors can be bypassed to configure Maximus to suit any compression task.
• Two saturation types per LMH & Master bands, with independent gain.
• Mixing between the frequency dependent compressors and the master, perfect for parallel & NY-style compression.
• 4 Independent stereo separation control per band.

Maximus is available for Windows in VST and FL Studio effect plug-in formats at the introductory price of $119 (instead of $189) until the October 31st. A demo version is available.