Press Play has released Wave Breaker, a free true-peak limiter plugin for both Mac and Windows users.
We believe Wave Breaker is one of the strongest entries to the KVR Developer Challenge of this year since it comprises a polished user interface with advanced features usually found in expensive limiter plugins.
Firstly, it is presented as a true-peak stereo brick-wall limiter, promising high levels of transparency and instant visual feedback for a seamless workflow.
Transparency is achieved through precise true-peak detection, look-ahead audio analysis, and a 4x oversampling option to avoid distortion even at high gain reduction values.
You also have full control over the amount of saturation you may want to apply to the signal. With added saturation, the limiter makes its character apparent by handling peaks more aggressively.
The visual feedback looks great, too. Wave Breaker has a large input signal display on the left, a gain reduction scope, and an automatically zoom-adjusted output waveform on the right. This way, you can evaluate your limiter settings in real time for a seamless workflow.
Wave Breaker also features a toggle for switching between two different gain control modes, and you can choose between a manual compensation mode and target peak-level normalization.
This gives you more options for A/B testing, a key part of most audio post-production tasks.
A cool feature of Wave Breaker is its ability to customize the look and feel of the plugin by selecting from a range of color schemes and window sizes to suit your style.
The design concept and waveform display engine are borrowed from Wave Observer, a free oscilloscope plugin released some time ago by the same developer worth checking out.
On the bottom-right of Wave Breaker, there is a menu for selecting various limiter behavior models, a latency measurement, and independent Preserve and Saturate controls to fine-tune the limiting effect.
We are seriously impressed by the effort put into this plugin, which could well compete with the other free limiters we selected in this article.
If you’re after a more comprehensive and advanced limiter, we suggest looking at MLimiterX by MeldaProduction, which is now discounted.
Wave Breaker is available as a VST, VST3, and AU Plugin for both Mac and Windows.
Download: Wave Breaker (it doesn’t require an account to download it, but you need to be a KVR registered user to vote for it)
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Last Updated on July 7, 2023 by Tomislav Zlatic.
