Sonible wins the award for transparency, their limiter and compressor are the cleanest in the industry. I like that they can be rude and aggressive when needed!
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion.. but i think this is a fantastic limiter.. i mix and master metal and have tried many limiters and this one just works the best for me.
Just a note to say that in your video, the tests were conducted with oversampling switched on. The oversampling setting in LIMITER is specifically only designed for the NRG and PCH sliders, which are ‘flavours’. It switches on/off automatically when these sliders are in use. Oversampling introduces those kind of patterns you saw in your tests. We understand that technical tests can appear to be meaningless marketing tools, but these are the kinds of tests we use to analyse and improve our algorithms. When we run a fair technical test, we can see that the distortion in our limiter is lower (image attached). This translates to more clarity in the low-end for discerning listeners. Stepping away from technical tests, LIMITER will give you audibly better clarity in the low-end than most limiters. Smart Limit is a great limiter, and in all of our audio test, always sounded as good. You can check those audio tests out here if you want: www.dropbox.com/sh/6c7s8qpqg1ci6x5/AABaW0YIdWslEGbtOl7z0nola?dl=1
love your plugins! also yea im not sure what white sea was thinking because oversampling takes the audio from the inaudible range and brings them into the audible range so he basically just showed that you guys have proper oversampling and complained about it
also why does your plugin installer call on processes to potentially map the keyboard and key input and also potential screenshot? is it some DRM or is it for crash reports or something?
And you guys used these audiofiles to test the sound of LIMITER? Really? I find it curious and also annoying that in every test (HipHop, House, Pop, Rock) LIMITER is up to 0,7db louder than the other limiters. I was wondering why LIMITER sounds better than the rest, then i measured LUFS and here we go. This is not fair and you wasted my time.
@@lemonaudio We used the same settings for each limiter, so you're still comparing the limiters like for like. The last thing we want is for you to feel mislead. We'll be happy to hook you up with a complimentary EXPOSE 2 license so you can easily level match the files and compare the difference, removing any gain differences.
There is no True Peak detection without oversampling. If True Peak detection and Oversampling are separate settings, then Oversampling is probably for the audio path, and TPD is "oversampling only the detector path". If only the detector path is oversampled, the detector can respond to True Peaks, and the non-oversampled audio path can get its gain reduction at project sample-rate. Possibly lower CPU munch (because audio processing is in project sample-rate, not oversampled sample-rate), no negative side-effects from oversampling filters on the audio path (filtering "cuts off" some high frequency content), but still prone to some aliasing. Also oversampling the audio path will help with reducing the aliasing, but it creates that "knee" rolloff towards Nyquist.
@@GingerDrums What does this have to do with what he said tho lol? What he is saying is the way TP works is by using Oversampling. You can't have TP without using oversampling. That's what he meant. 🙂
@@matt_nyc_audioengineer hey Hun, just backing up his hypothesis with a well know example! TPL requires oversampling, but it might not have the whole anti-aliasing effect that running the full audiopath in oversampling would have.
@@GingerDrums I understand. From how I understand it to work it does. Now I could VERY easily be mistaken lol. I am working on a beta for a limiter that is about to be released and this exact topic has been discussed AT LENGTH 🤣 between the developers and some of the testers. As I said I could very well be wrong. Basically we keep asking for oversampling and the developers say they are considering it but said the TP feature does take care of the oversampling we are asking for if we use it. Now the oversampling is also necessary for the TP limiting to work the way it does. It’s super confusing honestly. 🤷🏻♂️
Unfortunately what you wish it was possible at 4:19 is not possible with current technology. No plugin standard (VST3,AU or AAX) provides a plugin with access to the whole audio in a track. The plugin only receives chunks of audio to analyze and process from the DAW
@@andrewrice9383 to be fair a plugin could also support ARA which allows folk track to be requested by the plugin for analysis but not everyDAW does, and PT also has AudioSuite that can do the same but for small developers becomes a mess because you have to support different extension on different DAW, it's already quite hard to support 3/4 plugin format.
As a producer i find it more handy to have a plugin not start with over-sampling on, since most of the times in the process i just need some quick limiting to get the idea out and save cpu for all those other plugins. But as a mixing/mastering engineer i could understand why you would want it on by default.
There are plenty of clean limiters, nearly all of them don't limit that well because to properly limit there is always going to be distortion. I tried out d16 frontier the other day, couldn't get it to distort but at a certain point it just turned it down and didn't really reduce dynamic range just pinned everything to -24 until the input signal went down, barely affected micro dynamics. Its the amount and how it sounds that matters, an l1 is crunchy as hell, most modern multi bands and much smoother and can be pushed further though start to lose transient detail. If clean limiting was best, clippers would never be used. That said I think this limiter sounds fine, its just the marketing is a bit silly, its clear that adding distortion gets a lot louder plus noone needs lufs to be like -5 these days especially if the limiter is the main reason (ie not aggressive music that has no dynamics by design) was interesting that the Sonible was cleaner.
OMG, *exactly.* I've been thinking this for a couple of years: analyzers--and the "smart" mastering tools--should have the capability to analyze the whole song and THEN make decisions. Actually, if I use the youlean analyzer in audacity, I can analyze the whole song, and very quickly (on an Apple M1 processor...). Thanks for the video.
The problem here are the restrictions of the DAWs. As a plug-in, you simply don't have access to all the data of a channel. Except if you are using ARA (audio random access) technology - but ARA comes with a couple of problems and limitations: a) Not all DAWS (e.g. Ableton live) support ARA (yet) b) The plug-in has to be the first plug-in in the processing chain. Which is not ideal for a tool like a limiter. c) ARA only allows to access actual audio-files placed on a channel. That means you can't use an ARA plug-in on the master bus (or any bus where signals are summed together) - again not ideal for a tool like a limiter. So, please dear DAW manufacturers - help us to move audio processing to the 21st century! The algorithms to do so are ready.... ;)
I mostly use SmartLimit these days but recently tried the Focusrite FAST limiter which is also powered by Sonible. Amazingly it sounded a bit cleaner than SmartLimit on the track I was mastering. I prefer the user interface of SmartLimit though and I suspect whatever Sonible added to FAST Limiter will probably end up in SmartLimit 2 when that inevitably comes along. I tried the demo of MTM Limiter and you have to go real easy on that NRG slider as it distorts quite easily. I like the MTM Limiter user interface and I think it's big selling point is it's simplicity and ease at getting quick results.
I can believe what you are saying about Sonnible making Fast. My first experience with this kind of craziness was Softube making Native Inst classic compressors- which I think sound better than Softube’s own stuff.
The Sonible smart:limit is really clean compared to others, I've been testing it vs the one in Ozone and the limiter types in Ozone does have character.
I bought smart limit, and I would love to love it. However, in spite of all its facilities, I end up with a better and more musical result with Ozone, especially Ozone 10.
SmartLimt and Pro-L2 are the best out there and one thing worth mentioning is that you used Pro-L2 on the "Modren" mood or algorithm. give it a try using the "Safe" algorithm and see how transparent it is.... It almost looks like SmartLimt Try different algorithm with Pro-L2 these were designed for a reason
Elevate lite multiband limiting followed by Sonible, Sonible smart compressor and smart eq in there too, surgical all taken care oh and then of to character plugins if needed
I really like your vids! BUT. Your "source" videos on which you check out these plugin ins are (in my opinion) already way to processed. Those are already awesome and finished songs (soundwise) It's a little bit like mixing on finished Toto or Michael Jackson Songs.... These already shine.... I'd rather see you mixing the shit out of not or only litte processed premixes...... But still - don't get this wrong! - I apprechiate your videos!!!! Thank you so much!!!
There's a complaint I have heard that true peak limiting sounds worse than project sample rate limiting, can anyone shed some light on why this would be or if it's bullshit?
If you want to have analisis for whole song you might wanna consider giving steinbergs wavelab a shot, I am having much better results since I separated my workflow to 2 distinct programs, I keep my mastering VST library clutter free. Well I could write a book on how much I love having separate “daw” for mastering..
I have all of these plugins. But in sonnible I dont know, its clean but there is a weird phasing issue. But I cannot find any of that in other plugins it's only happening with sonnible. Does anyone know why?
i liked your comment about wanting to have a mastering limiter that doesn't require realtime analysis, because you wre essentially asking for an ARA-powered mastering limiter, something that does not exist yet and would finally add something new, which is not melodyne or similar to melodyne to the ARA plugins universe. but one important question remains. Would that even work? Because typically you have multiple effects running on a master bus before going into the final limiter and they do need to work in realtime. so how would it work to have an effect at the end of the chain that is running pseudo-offline? genuine question. i'm not too familiar with the ARA API yet. maybe it has an answer to this question but no one dared to try yet...
that's a bummer, but simultanously just what i expected. that would mean an ARA-based mastering plugin would always have to be the first in chain, just like melodyne is on vocal tracks. Maybe that also has some mastering potential, but not as a final mastering limiter
11:26 this playlist can only been seen, if you are already a member ;-) Some kind of "demo" (like you always ask the plugin makers to do) would be useful, so i could think about becoming a member ;-)
