Limiter or Soft Clipper?
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Hi there, a few days ago I had several projects I created, (a sampler and 2 effects) on one track in Ableton. When I turned the effects up a bit, it became more clipping. What would you recommend to suppress this? Limiter or soft/hard clipper? Hise Modules or RNBO or Faust? Thanks in advance
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@treynterrio If there is a lot of increase in the output, it means that there are points that need to be fixed in gain staging of fx chain. I think the first thing you should do is to ensure that the output is not too high by taking care of the gain staging stage of these effects and sampler output gain.
After ensuring this, if you aim to keep the sound output at a safe point, a limiter would make more sense. Soft clippers will add some distortion to the sound.
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Agreed, a limiter is best practice.
Of course, having gain staging options within your plugin (a loudness meter and an output gain knob, or some kind of autogain) would meant that it never clips in the first place
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@griffinboy @orange can you recommend a limiter? rnbo? faust?
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I mean, I make my own c++ nodes so I don't know about that.
Hise should have a built in one that will suffice.If you want something specific then yeah, you'll need to look into some more special limiters.
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@treynterrio As @orange says the best method is to gain stage within the fx chain. Test it out and use simple gain nodes when you think it is appropriate. Say you have a waveshaper and the "drive" parameter is adding 12dB of gain, then use a simplegain and offset it by the same amount.
Adding a limiter can help but you should only do this if it is absolutely necessary. There is a really great faust limiter I like to use a lot https://faustlibraries.grame.fr/libs/compressors/#colimiter_1176_r4_stereo
And there is more in the faust library you can try if it doesn't work for you. You could probably get similar results in RNBO but faust is faster to implement and well-researched.
