Lately I have been loving the Apogee Soft Limit clipper plugin. They are offering it for free for a limited time.
I’m mainly using it as a clipper on individual tracks. I’ve even occasionally tried it on the mix bus with good results.
Apogee say it aims to replicate analog tape sound. It’s different to many other tape emulations out there in that it doesn’t seem to emulate things like wow and flutter. So it’s a stable and predictable sound, and one that I really like on my music. In small amounts it sounds very clean. When pushed, I would describe it as subtly aggressive. It thickens up the mid range in a wonderful way.
The plugin is very easy to work with and gives me good results quickly. Besides controlling the peaks I draw for it to adds that nice attitude in the mid range. Unlike a lot of saturation plugins out there, this one doesn’t sound fizzy. So you can use it on plenty of tracks without over hyping the top end of the mix.
The plugin seems to be quite CPU friendly even with 16x oversampling switched on.
It’s good to know that if you’re using any of the oversampling settings in 44/48k sample rates, the oversampling filter will cut into the top end air a little bit.
I wouldn’t say it’s a problem in most situations. But it might be if you want to use it on the mix bus for instance. Apogee said it’s a conscious decision they’ve made after listening tests when designing the oversampling implementation.
This cutting of the top end doesn’t happen in higher sample rates, because higher SR allows placing the OS filter further up, above audible frequencies. I work mostly at 96k currently.
There was an issue with the VST3 version for me. It kept resetting to default settings when loading the project. I’m sure they’ll fix it soon, but I just use the VST2 version which works fine.
At the time of writing this, Soft Limit is available for free. You can grab it here: