When it comes to mastering music and media projects for maximum impact across the wildly loudness-variable gamut of streaming services, a well specified limiter is essential. With so many stellar plugins on the market, though, sorting the merely good from the truly great can be tricky, so allow us to get you started with seven of what we consider to be the best.

Sonnox Oxford Limiter V3

A staple in the plugins folders of many a big-name producer for almost 20 years now (since the release of V1), Sonnox’s sublime true peak limiter is straightforward, reliable and given something of a leg up by its very helpful Enhance function. This applies sample value limiting to further increase perceived loudness, rescue transient overshoots and generally improve the end product, and as long as it’s used with full understanding of the processes at work, it can really deliver.

On top of that, the adjustable Soft Knee enables a high level of control over the onset of compression, and you also get a variable-depth dithering algorithm with four noise-shaping curves, push-button intersample peak detection (switching the meters to ITU-R BS.1770 compliant True Peak mode) and limiting.

Easy to use and redoubtable in its audio embiggening prowess, Oxford Limiter V3 is the very model of a pro-quality limiting plugin.

Tokyo Dawn Records Limiter 6 GE

The absurdly low pricetag might suggest a limiter that must surely be, well, limited, but TDR’s hugely popular dynamics plugin is in fact anything but.

Limiter 6 Gentleman’s Edition gives you four modular processing blocks to work with: a clipper, a compressor and two limiters – High Frequency Limiter and Peak Limiter. The compressor and clipper are great, but that’s not why we’re here, so see the website for info on those. High Frequency Limiter is a powerful tool for reining in hi-hats, sibilance and other top-end excesses. A high shelving filter set anywhere between 1500Hz and 18kHz determines the point above which limiting kicks in, and gain reduction can be applied absolutely or based on the relative balance of high-frequency content to the rest of the signal.

The Peak Limiter, meanwhile, offers single and multiband options, the second yielding extraordinary transparency, and is switchable between brick wall and non-brick wall modes.

And the limiting doesn’t quite end there! The Output module at the end of the chain applies final True Peak or dBFS limiting, with adjustable input drive and a delta function for soloing the attenuated part of the signal.

All of this is accompanied by a well-stocked metering section and the brilliant and innovative Stereo + Wide processing mode (a stereo-side alternative to mid-side encoding/decoding); and, of course, there are also the other two modules, which are no slouches either.

An endlessly versatile and sonically superlative dynamics suite for mixing and mastering at an unbelievable price, Limiter 6 GE is absolutely essential.

Avid Pro Limiter

An oldie but a goodie, Pro Limiter furnishes Pro Tools users (ie, it’s AAX only) with a fast, friendly and highly efficient true peak limiter built for both music and post production. Manual and Auto Release settings facilitate tailoring to the dynamic timing of the source material, while the Character knob introduces analogue-style saturation, and the histogram visualises the loudness profile over time. Up to 7.1 surround is supported, and the included Loudness Analyzer AudioSuite plugin analyses complete tracks and reports on their peak loudness levels at a click. Handy.

Sonible smart:limit

Joining their smart:comp and smart:eq plugins at the end of 2021, Sonible’s AI-driven limiter makes the process of preparing a master for streaming on all the main platforms almost effortless. Select a genre-based profile or import a reference track, click the Record button and play the loudest section of your track to have smart:limit do its analytical thing and automatically set itself up for what it considers to be optimal limiting. The parameters adjusted comprise Style (from transparent to punchy and everything in between), Saturation, Balance and Bass Control, as well as Attack and Release, and all of these can be tweaked to taste after the analysis completes, as you’d expect.

With that done, select a Publishing Target (Spotify, Apple Music, etc) in the monitoring section and set the Gain to hit the suggested loudness (in LUFS). The ingenious Quality Check algorithm constantly compares the effects of your gain and ceiling tweaks to the Publishing Target and genre profile databases, and makes specific suggestions as to how to correct anything that it perceives to be erroneous. It even tells you how much your selected streaming service will turn your track down by upon submission.

Remarkable not only for its intelligence, which at the very least always provides a solid starting point for finessing into a final setup, but also its impressive sound, whether driven gently or hard, smart:limit feels like something from the future. See and hear it in action in Luke Goddard’s article Can A Smart Limiter Really Do the Job? and video below.

FabFilter Pro-L 2

Regarded by many as representing the last word in contemporary limiter design, FabFilter’s staggeringly extensive plugin gets you off to a quick start with its selection of eight limiting styles (Transparent, Punchy, Modern, Bus, etc), and leaves no metering stone unturned, catering to Standard (-16, -32, -48), LUFS (including EBU R128, ITU-R BS.1770-4 and ATSC A/85) and K-System (K-12, K-14, K-20) types. Then there’s true peak limiting, independent channel linking for the transient/lookahead (up to 5ms) and release stages, up to 7.1.2 multichannel support, up to 32x linear-phase oversampling, a sidechain input, a DC offset filter, dithering and more.

We particularly like the informative tags that appear on heavily limited peaks in the level display, showing how much gain reduction is being applied to them – it’s this kind of thoughtfully applied attention to detail that makes every FabFilter plugin stand out from the crowd, and Pro-L 2 is no exception.

Watch Julian put Pro-L 2 to work in his video…

Signum Audio Bute Loudness Suite 2

Scottish developer Signum Audio’s extension of their Bute Loudness Analyser true peak metering system, Bute Loudness Suite 2 centres on an all-encompassing set of deeply configurable meters that can be calibrated to a wide range of broadcast and streaming standards (and your own presets), and the interactive History View display, which shows the continuous True Peak, Short Term, Momentary and RMS values, and flags up overs, for up to ten hours. The limiter itself has only three controls – input gain, release curve (Natural, Transparent or Smooth), and auto-release multiplier – and eschews the conventional envelope-following approach in favour of an amazingly transparent waveshaping algorithm.

Available in stereo and surround (up to 7.1.4) versions, and including the Bute Loudness Normaliser AudioSuite plugin and standalone application for offline analysis and normalising, and the nicely complementary Bute 2 Limiter, Bute Loudness Suite 2 is a visually comprehensive, fuss-free and incredibly effective solution for platform-targeted loudness maximising.

Sonible pure:limit

Aimed at musicians, podcasters and contemporary content creators of all kinds, Sonible’s second entrant in our list is surely as reductive as a limiter could ever be. Deploying the same AI technology and true peak limiting algorithm as smart:limit, pure:limit does all the hard dynamics processing work for you, steered by the bare minimum of user input at the front end. Choose a musical genre from the usual list of suspects (‘Electronic’, ‘Acoustic’, ‘Rock’, ‘Hip hop’, etc) or ‘Speech’ for dialogue work, give the plugin a blast of the loudest section of your source material and… well, that’s it! Based on what it hears, pure:limit automatically sets a limiting Style (Soft, Neutral or Hard), input Gain level and Inflate (a combination of smart:limit’s Saturation and Bass Control, we suspect) amount, all of which often hit the spot with uncanny efficacy, but can of course be nudged manually if required. It’s a nifty solution for anyone looking to getting their peaks under control without having to negotiate the intricacies of limiting for themselves, and it certainly impressed Luke Goddard, as his article and video We Check Out The Simplest AI Limiter Yet - Sonible Purelimit makes apparent…

Is the absence of your favourite limiter in our list grinding your gears? Put it straight in the comments…