Zen Limiter

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, and turn it back up over the course of some number of samples after the last sample above the limit.

A lot of the magic is in how the samples before and after the trigger are managed - this is the thing that makes different hardware, and software, limiters good for one instrument or another.

In fact, what most limiter vendors compete on is the way the signal before and after the peak gets chewed on.

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.