This plugin is a digital-first take on hard-limiting audio, with fine-grained control over every detail of how it gets applied to peaks in audio.
Most limiters use a take-it-or-leave-it approach to what they actually do to audio, giving you a knob for the limit and perhaps one for lookahead time.
All limiters - or at least all that don’t sound terrible - use some amount of lookahead:
- They begin turning down the volume a few millisconds before the first sample above the limit
- They turn it back up over the course of some number of samples after the last sample above the limit.
A lot of the magic - the difference between various limiters - is in how the samples before and after the trigger are shaped, to ease them down to the limit and back up as the limiter releases.
That is what most limiter vendors compete on.
So why not make that configurable to your heart’s desire?
Instead of picking one my-way-or-the-highway algorithm, Zen Limiter gives you a choice - you can separately choose
- The lookahead time (up to 50 milliseconds)
- The release time (up to 50 milliseconds)
- The ease-in curve - the shape of how samples before the peak that triggered it get their gain reduced
- The ease-out curve - the shape of how gain is returned to normal
And with its detailed, highly-accurate simulation view, you can see exactly how Zen Limiter is going to affect peaks in your audio.
