Tone Projects Limiter Uni-L

[Rui_Inoue]

I don't have much money, but the quality was so good that I just couldn't resist buying it.

Unless the 2mix is completely incompatible with Tone Projects' signature sound, the Uni-L is probably the best—and only—option.

[konXfront]

caught up in the excitement as well because i was convinced by Unisum and Kelvin. had the problem of. to finding Uni-L in the inserts dialog for mono tracks in protools. also, it crashes protools when using the audition tool in AudioSuite.

is this happening for anyone else?

[konXfront]

But yeah, there is absolutely no doubt about it. Tone Projects Uni-L is now the absolute king of limiters and will probably remain so for quite some time. I just hope people realize that it's all about the presets when you start out with it. It gives immediate, superior, results to any and all of the competition with an almost "one knob" behavior if you just stick to the presets and tag/re-save your favorites. There is absolutely zero need to go deep into the weeds of the controls. They are there for crazy tweak enthusiasts like Bob Macc.. and me!

good to know! thanks for the info.

btw: any luck using uni-l on a mono track or in AudioSuite?

[dastewart]

I thought I'd quickly mention (in case Rune is reading these comments) that I find it pretty much impossible to evaluate this using the demo. This really needs detail listening and comparisons and the way the demo works is making it really tough. The white noise and inability to save settings means that I can't actually use this properly on the sessions I'm mixing which is where I could properly evaluate it.

Give me a 14 day fully working version and I probably wouldn't still be sitting on the fence.

Perhaps it's just me, and I realise this isn't a trivial task, but I thought I'd mention it because it may be a significant barrier to more sales.

[bmanic]

100% agree. We are definitely not the only ones getting annoyed by these demos. Rune IS very aware of this and I do hope he is considering other alternatives. The only positive with noise / dropout demos is that they don't time out.. but that's about the only benefit.

[billinder33]

Even if the noise interval was expanded it would be a big improvement on the demo version. What's a typical track on the low side? 2:30? 2:45? Being slightly under that would stop most exporting. But yeah, I prefer time-boxed, fully-featured demos.

Regardless, I bought it. Slightly prefer the sound in many cases to my other limiters and the transient shaping definitely has its uses. It was the intro pricing that pushed me over the edge, and knowing it'll probably never be cheaper.

[chagzuki]

The demo for me had periodic dropouts, not white noise. I guess Rune changed this at some point?
Personally I can't stand time-limited demos, I don't like the pressure to make a decision.

I've almost gone full-circle with this now: getting used to the complex controls has been interesting and educational, but largely brought me back to the view that such fine-tuning makes almost no difference to me in most circumstances. There will probably be some circumstances in which it makes some difference, but for the most part any limiter is fine.
It's also reminded me the degree to which perceived differences in sound can be a psychological byproduct of visual stimuli, i.e. fictional, and for that reason it would be quite handy to be able to switch off all animated metering.

[audenso]

I was hoping to see immersive/Atmos support implemented. That said, Pro‑L 2 has provided this capability for quite a while already.

[TechHaus]

I was hoping to see immersive/Atmos support implemented. That said, Pro‑L 2 has provided this capability for quite a while already.

Toneboosters are immersive compatible as well.

[NeonNightflyer]

In the 'Modern' preset category you'll find my preset called "Dutch Default" which sort of emulates my current default Pro-L2 settings. It's quite closely matching it in terms of tonality and action, on almost all audio material. So if you are familiar with Pro-L2, that is a place you can start.

My other preset, "Gold Standard" (also in the 'Modern' category) is one that should be able to stay relatively transparent and still go really loud. Transparent, meaning when you enable and disable Uni-L, or compare it using the gain match feature, it should closely resemble the original incoming audio.

Uni-L is deep, obviously. This means it can take some time to get used to it.. but I highly recommend going through the presets and find your favorites, then use those as your starting template. The idea behind Uni-L is that it should theoretically be able "to just sound good" on virtually everything. And if it does not, it has the built in capability to be tweaked until it does.

Hi bmanic,

Thank you for mentioning the Gold Standard preset. This is what beat out AL-1 (which I've been using for months) on a master I'm working on and convinced me to buy Uni-L. Cheers.

[dastewart]

I'm nearly at the point of buying this. The way the demo works (see earlier post) is driving me slightly nuts but there's no doubt that this is cleaner than my previous setup and the quick start system works really well for getting me to a place I like even if I don't always understand why. But if I just stop there, and never bother to learn the controls (despite good intentions) it's a definite step up from where I was .....

....at loudness levels that I don't normally go to. And there's the rub. At the kind of gain reduction levels I normally use then the difference is "subtle" - I've come to believe that when people say "subtle" in audio engineering they really mean that they can't hear a difference even though they think they should. But if I crank it up then that's when the power of this plugin really becomes obvious, both in terms of comparing it to other limiters but also in terms of the way the controls work, even the quick start selections.

I've never chased loudness, beyond making sure my stuff sounds pretty much as loud as everybody else's once the streaming services have done their thing, but I do care how compressors, clippers, limiters change the energy and feel of a track and I'm still trying to get my head round pushing harder into the limiter because that's a mind-set change I'd have to make to really get value out of this.

[manymanyhaha]

Has Tone Projects always had a one computer restriction? I could have sworn that I had their other plugins installed on two computers.

Edit: So it is one computer AT A TIME. Ok.........

[billinder33]

I'm nearly at the point of buying this. The way the demo works (see earlier post) is driving me slightly nuts but there's no doubt that this is cleaner than my previous setup and the quick start system works really well for getting me to a place I like even if I don't always understand why.

....at loudness levels that I don't normally go to. And there's the rub. At the kind of gain reduction levels I normally use then the difference is "subtle" - I've come to believe that when people say "subtle" in audio engineering they really mean that they can't hear a difference even though they think they should. But if I crank it up then that's when the power of this plugin really becomes obvious, both in terms of comparing it to other limiters but also in terms of the way the controls work, even the quick start selections.

One thing I find really strange is that as you move the preset macro/slider, some of the settings will move in one direction, then change direction at some point and reverse course. Another thing I've noticed is that many of the controls when moved, even to extremes, will be almost unnoticeable. But when you move several of them together even slightly, the results differ dramatically. Which is why I wish they had put an abstraction layer in that consolidates some of the functions in a logical way that allows for quicker configuration without reducing he plugin to 'dummy level' like the presets.

I've never chased loudness, beyond making sure my stuff sounds pretty much as loud as everybody else's once the streaming services have done their thing, but I do care how compressors, clippers, limiters change the energy and feel of a track and I'm still trying to get my head round pushing harder into the limiter because that's a mind-set change I'd have to make to really get value out of this.

Same. My stuff is plenty loud before it ever reaches a limiter. I've been mostly using Krafter to push loudness, bit I've thinking about spreading the workload around a bit, which is how I intend to deploy Uni-L, offloading some of the heavy lifting that Krafter's doing.

[bmanic]

One thing I find really strange is that as you move the preset macro/slider, some of the settings will move in one direction, then change direction at some point and reverse course. Another thing I've noticed is that many of the controls when moved, even to extremes, will be almost unnoticeable. But when you move several of them together even slightly, the results differ dramatically. Which is why I wish they had put an abstraction layer in that consolidates some of the functions in a logical way that allows for quicker configuration without reducing he plugin to 'dummy level' like the presets.

.. and that exactly is the crux. We spent stupid amount of time (months/year!!!) on this with Pro-L and Pro-L2. It's very easy to say what you just did, to actually DO it and reduce a bunch of _extremely program dependent_ things into single macro controls is NOT a trivial task.

Just think of how many different music genres there are, then think of how different kinds of transients there are, now add on top of that different sections in music with different frequency content and tempo.. all of this should "just work".

This also touches on why some old compressor designs are so sought after and some topologies "just work". They weren't perhaps designed with exactly this kind of detail in mind but rather the topology and available technology just happens to be quite forgiving and suitable for compression. For instance Vari-Mu and Opto systems (with an actual light bulb + the panel that converts this to voltages).

Now take this and turn it on it's head. You know of and have mastered different techniques to achieve optimal results for hundreds of different tiny slices of audio and macro pieces of music, all tuned to be as unobtrusive as possible for all situations, at the absolute micro level (at the very limits of distortion), masking as much as possible behind psychoacustic phenomenon and our hearing limits. Now just combine all of those systems into a single knob, or a few of them.

While it WOULD be nice to have some sort of macro controls (and the starting preset slider is a good start) it's a whole can of worms that easily eats up another year of development. We already have these systems with other limiters and brands. I just glad we now have one system that is almost completely open to the user to tweak any way you please. The unfortunate downside is that it does take quite some effort to master and to learn every interaction. It's also possible to arrive at quite unoptimal results, though luckily it's easy to start over and not very easy to arrive at horrible results.