Tone Projects Limiter Uni-L

[billinder33]

As a full bundle owner, at 40% off I'm all over this. Unfortunately I see the intro pricing, but haven't yet seen the loyalty discount.

Anyone know how the loyalty discount is delivered/applied?

[Vortifex]

Trying the demo. I like how it holds up well across the entire frequency spectrum when pushed loud. Minimal pumping and the transients don't get mushy. More options than I care to have on a limiter but I guess some of those can be ignored without too many issues.

[sl1200mk2]

As a full bundle owner, at 40% off I'm all over this. Unfortunately I see the intro pricing, but haven't yet seen the loyalty discount.

Anyone know how the loyalty discount is delivered/applied?

I received an email with what looks to be a unique discount code you apply at checkout. Emails might be sent out in batches, but check your junk folder, etc. if you don’t receive one, email support and sure Rune will sort you out.

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

As a full bundle owner, at 40% off I'm all over this. Unfortunately I see the intro pricing, but haven't yet seen the loyalty discount.

Anyone know how the loyalty discount is delivered/applied?

I posted this on Gearspace:

I didn't get one either, but I found a workaround to access the code.

If you have any old promotional emails from Tone Projects, dig one up*.

Now, in that email, click the link at the bottom to manage your subscription preferences. On that screen, you'll see the coupon code.

*The last one I had was from 2024. Not sure if they haven't sent any emails in two years, or if I somehow got unsubscribed, or they have an email problem. I don't remember unsubscribing.

[bmanic]

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.

[pekbro]

Won’t they just give you a code if you ask? Why do we need a workaround?

I own everything practically, if they don’t give me one, I won’t ever buy anything from them again. Since it would make no sense at all.

[billinder33]

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.

Lot of parameters here. Presets aside, if starting from scratch or init is there a general workflow you would follow to dial this in? Would you start with the speed settings? The crossovers? Dynamics?

[Rune L-H]

As a full bundle owner, at 40% off I'm all over this. Unfortunately I see the intro pricing, but haven't yet seen the loyalty discount.

Anyone know how the loyalty discount is delivered/applied?

Hey, you should receive a coupon sent to your registered email address. If not, please send an email to support at toneprojects.com and we'll sort it out.

Cheers,
Rune

[bmanic]

Lot of parameters here. Presets aside, if starting from scratch or init is there a general workflow you would follow to dial this in? Would you start with the speed settings? The crossovers? Dynamics?

When I start from scratch I usually start with the Natural startup preset (one of the six startup choices). Then I set the main gain knob until I get the loudness level I am after and lower the Transient threshold until the light is blinking on my transients. After that it's all about fine tuning things. If I want a lot more loudness than the initial settings are capable of, I'll start messing with the Clip Attack feature and clipping in general. I may even use the Boost Transients knob, between 1 to 10%.

One of the last things I experiment with are the look-a-head timings and the crossovers. But it's rarely necessary unless you go for extreme loudness.

This is such a deep plugin that I'd be lying if I say that I grok absolutely everything about it and what it is capable of. This is going to take years to fully explore. However, what is already there, in terms of presets "that just work" is more than enough for 99% of what I do.

I'll try to write a more complete writeup on how I'd go about using it in a real world scenario but for now I recommend the video I linked to.

Here is also another video that goes into quite a bit of detail in how it operates and how the author of the video approaches the plugin and it's capabilities.

[j olhorst]

Lot of parameters here. Presets aside, if starting from scratch or init is there a general workflow you would follow to dial this in? Would you start with the speed settings? The crossovers? Dynamics?

When I start from scratch I usually start with the Natural startup preset (one of the six startup choices). Then I set the main gain knob until I get the loudness level I am after and lower the Transient threshold until the light is blinking on my transients. After that it's all about fine tuning things. If I want a lot more loudness than the initial settings are capable of, I'll start messing with the Clip Attack feature and clipping in general. I may even use the Boost Transients knob, between 1 to 10%.

One of the last things I experiment with are the look-a-head timings and the crossovers. But it's rarely necessary unless you go for extreme loudness.

This is such a deep plugin that I'd be lying if I say that I grok absolutely everything about it and what it is capable of. This is going to take years to fully explore. However, what is already there, in terms of presets "that just work" is more than enough for 99% of what I do.

I'll try to write a more complete writeup on how I'd go about using it in a real world scenario but for now I recommend the video I linked to.

Here is also another video that goes into quite a bit of detail in how it operates and how the author of the video approaches the plugin and it's capabilities.

ok... ok... you've earned your commission. I'm pulling out the credit card...

[billinder33]

Lot of parameters here. Presets aside, if starting from scratch or init is there a general workflow you would follow to dial this in? Would you start with the speed settings? The crossovers? Dynamics?

When I start from scratch I usually start with the Natural startup preset (one of the six startup choices). Then I set the main gain knob until I get the loudness level I am after and lower the Transient threshold until the light is blinking on my transients. After that it's all about fine tuning things. If I want a lot more loudness than the initial settings are capable of, I'll start messing with the Clip Attack feature and clipping in general. I may even use the Boost Transients knob, between 1 to 10%.

One of the last things I experiment with are the look-a-head timings and the crossovers. But it's rarely necessary unless you go for extreme loudness.

This is such a deep plugin that I'd be lying if I say that I grok absolutely everything about it and what it is capable of. This is going to take years to fully explore. However, what is already there, in terms of presets "that just work" is more than enough for 99% of what I do.

I'll try to write a more complete writeup on how I'd go about using it in a real world scenario but for now I recommend the video I linked to.

Here is also another video that goes into quite a bit of detail in how it operates and how the author of the video approaches the plugin and it's capabilities.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I'm doing a bunch of mastering right now and was waiting for this to come out so I could compare against the AL-1 to see if either of them could supplant Pro-L. I guess the wait is finally over!!

Expensive month for me. Just pulled the trigger on the Relab 176 and upgraded to VoiceAssist Advanced. Also debating on pulling the trigger on OD De-edger, Limen, and Maselec-MLA-4, all of which I've found useful when demoing this week. My wallet is hoping that Pro-L holds up against these heavyweight contenders!!

[sl1200mk2]

TL;DR: Yeah, this is an endgame limiter. Pretty gobsmacked by this one. It'll take a while to really learn it, but I can see dropping several of my prior choices from the rotation.

I have a mastering template that I start sessions from, and I have a bunch of limiters set up with my own starting points that I can quickly swap in/out. Probably the top three I use the most are Pro-L2, Ozone 12, and Elevate, but there are several others. Typically, I hear a track and have a gut feeling about which limiter will be the best fit. They all have a 'sound' which is fine, I use the one that fits the track.

Now comes Uni-L. I've been going back through previous projects for a couple of hours. Where others are pretty much one thing and flavor, this guy... he's a total chameleon. In many cases, I actually prefer the sound of the track post-limiter than that of the source. It's kind of wild. Usually, it's just whatever is the best compromise.

Some high points so far:

* I'm not immediately putting a clipper before the limiter. Might not need to at all.
* It can get stupid loud (if that's what you want) before you need to back down.
* Great gain match.
* Excellent GUI and workflow.

Also, this is the first time where the presets are actually really good starting points. Kudos to everyone involved with them! Granted, it's a limited number, but every track so far, I've pretty quickly landed on a preset I was happy with that only took some minor tweaking. I don't feel the need to create my starting point immediately.

Those are some first honeymoon impressions, so take them for what you will, but I don't see my feelings souring over time. I'm looking forward to spending a lot more time with it.

[pekbro]

I did receive my loyalty offer in the mail tbf, thanks TP

[Nantho]

I've spend some time trying it this morning. Great tool, really nice, but not for me.

My current options for my mastering chain are taking me where I want to be much faster, essentially because I know those tools so well I guess.

As for the sound quality of the result, I didn't hear a significant enough difference. If I had the time to dig deeper, maybe I'd manage to get "better" results than what I currently have—whatever "better" means But honestly, I'm fully satisfied with my current sound and workflow, so I'm clearly not the target audience for this.

[billinder33]

I got up very early this morning to work with this. It's deeeeeep. Not entirely sure what to think about it.

In my test the input was being hit pretty hard with EDM at the very end of a mastering chain. So at 0db it's already providing about 1.5db of reduction. No issue there, Pro-L was doing the same. I assume this doesn't require stepping down to -18db or whatever like an analog emulation and it deals with any hot signal (within reason) in a linear fashion.

My biggest fear going in was that TP isn't really known for innovative monitoring and IMO this limiter really lacks the depth of metering it should have. There are a lot of settings where you're trying to monitor some kind of internal detection level with a small dot or light around a knob rather than a moving graph, and I don't find that to be particularly useful. No metering of limiting over time showing the effect of the attack/release curves like in Pro-L2. I really wish there was a series of tabs on the main monitor which would provide detailed metering for the clipping, transient detection, and overall limiting over time.

Also on the topic of metering, with the small slow/fast/clip reduction meter at the top left, I would be making changes to the slow settings and can visibly observe the changes in the meter. Just like reading a VU - nice! Not so much with the fast and clip meters - they seemed to stay fairly consistent regardless of how different the settings. So not really all that useful in my initial testing. The AMEK Mastering Comp, which doesn't have the greatest metering either, is far more useful for this kind of split-speed metering.

Second observation is that if you're not careful, this limiter can get very, very jumpy. Not something that can't be learned to avoid with a lot of use, but something to be aware of.

Third thing was that even though I would change a bunch settings, often when I would A/B it against a preset with radically different settings, in many cases the difference was negligible. To the point where I'm not sure the average audio engineer could reliably identify them in a blind A/B, even on a high end system. Perhaps I had too much smoothing to eliminate the jumpiness and that obscured all the seemingly big differences between the settings? Not sure.

I could see this being valuable for a full-time mastering engineer that gets all kinds of whacky problems to deal with, will take the time to learn it inside-out, and will use it frequently enough that they can navigate it quickly. Maybe it's better served on quiet mixes in slower musical styles where you really need to pull details from the mix? Or potentially useful if dealing with lots of squashed mixes from clients where you can't ask for mix revisions, and need to use the jumpiness of it to bring life back into dead tracks while maintaining loudness? Is it better in that context than Ozone 12's uncompress feature? Not entirely sure, but in many cases I've found it to be a hell of a lot of work for what is often a negligible payoff.

Overall I'm pretty impressed at the level of detail here. For myself, I've been leaning more into multi-band clipping for loudness and just using limiting as a final smoothing and true peak stage, so not sure this is something I need. A real shame because I wanted to love this, but it's likely a punt for me at this time. I did review this and the 'Spacey' forum before posting my thoughts here and there seems to be a group of people who feel similarly, so I'm not feeling as crazy as I was initially for not being completely enamored with it.


tldr; - really impressive limiter, extremely complex, however most people probably won't need or benefit from this level complexity. Highly recommend shooting it out against your existing options to see if it actually brings additional value over the limiters you already own.