FL Studio Fruity Limiter (Free)įL Studio’s stock limiter, which was used as a guide in this article. Often this option will suffice for any producer who wants to get more familiar with one.īelow is a list of some of the best free limiter plugins, and some more advanced options. Most DAWs provide their own limiter stock plugin.
The Best Limiter VST Plugins (Free and Paid) A limiter should only be used to catch those occasional peaks above 0db. Note that if your signal is constantly going over 0db during your recording, the issue probably lies in your input gain being set too high. However, some gentle limiting on a guitar or vocal recording can help avoid the signal going “into the red” and clipping. Although it’s best to avoid it in the first place, this is a nice second layer of safety. The reason is that the loss in dynamics resulting from the compression will be printed to audio and can never be recovered.
Heavy compression should generally be avoided when recording (unless you know what you’re doing). If you are experimenting with “breaking” sounds with multiple layers of distortion and EQ’ing, a limiter can come in handy to keep the levels down and discover quirky artifacts.
