can someone recommend a good VST limiter?

[M'Snah]

Elephant, and possible Kjaerhus GPP

[stefancrs]

buzzmaxi3

[crysonic]

Hi,

If you can wait for another two weeks (We are currently in the process of updating our website completely and will be releasing two new products on the launch date), we will be releasing a very unique look-ahead maximizer/limiter called SPECTRA'PHY (including SPECTRA'Q, but more on that later), it is a novel approach and different then others on the market today in it's implementation. It is based on physics or rather dynamics (verlet integration), and this allows us to provide many other options not available on others at this stage. It is very transparent and CPU efficient, the option to dial-in specific Harmonic enhancement is also available if required.

Cheers!
crysonic Australia

[martian]

I would say this depends on the style of music and how much you intend to slam the limiter. I can speak from personal experience in the past week that none of the free limiters mentioned in this thread hold a candle to Elephant when you really push the limiter HARD. Many of those free limiters are great for more moderate use, but if you really have to get radio-level volume you're very quickly going to have to look at a pro limiter like Elephant, or perhaps one of the Waves tools if you like spending money.

My $0.000001 worth ...

'radio-level' is creatd by the broadcast processors, no matter how loud the original signal you feed it. nice bit at the end of catz's book about it.

[AKJ]

for tracks I use buzzmaxi3 (for simplicity and great transparaency), for whole mixes elephant (for advanced features like dithering and metering)

[tahome]

...SPECTRA'PHY...

Oh no, not one of the MP3-style FFT artifact thingys please... everybody seems to jump on the "linear phase" bandwagon these days and they all sound like s###.

Sorry, I know this is based on prejudice that comes from hearing other products so bring on the demo!

Cheers,
--th

[dburgan]

'radio-level' is creatd by the broadcast processors, no matter how loud the original signal you feed it. nice bit at the end of catz's book about it.

Right, the broadcast processors further squash whatever is sent to them, but my point is that if you want to match the volume of commercial releases, meaning you're achieving *average* RMS somewhere around the -10 dB range, you are going to have to apply almost absurd amounts of gain through a mastering limiter, and *that* is when the cracks in any particular limiter start to show up.

Pull up any commercial release in your audio editor of choice and look at the waveform. They are so slammed that there is literally almost no whitespace left. The whole thing is nothing but waveform. It's just insane.

Anyway, speaking from direct experience, none of the free limiters I'm aware of (and that includes all the ones listed so far in this thread) are able to handle this kind of insane limiting without very audible artifacts, either pumping or distortion or both. I was actually surprised at the result, as I thought at least a few of those free limiters might be up to the task. But they weren't.

Again, if one is not attempting such a ridiculous amount of gain, then some of those free limiters will probably work just fine. A couple of them actually have a nice coloration that I like very much!

[ATS]

i will be using this limiter with a Waves SSL 4000 software compressor, mainly for mixing down drums in a techno track...

any suggestions?

Elephant