Apogee have announced that their Soft Limit plug-in is currently available to download for free.
Soft Limit was originally developed in the form of an analogue tape emulation circuit placed before the A-D conversion stage of Apogee’s AD-500 unit, and has been featured on nearly all of their converters that have been manufactured since.
The plug-in version features an adjustable soft limit threshold (as opposed to the fixed threshold of the original), and an Auto Makeup feature is available to increase the output level accordingly as the threshold is lowered. Manual output adjustment is also available, with ±18dB of adjustment on offer, whilst a Drive control providing ±18dB of level trim before the Soft Limit section allows access to more obvious sounding limiting.
The plug-in also offers oversampling rates up to 16x to help combat aliasing, and Apogee say that the plug-in is capable of efficient CPU usage and low latency performance even at the highest setting. Finally, Input, Soft Limit and Output meters offer an accurate visual indication of how the plug-in is affecting the input source.
Soft Limit is available in the AAX Native, AU, VST and VST3 formats. It is compatible with macOS 10.12.6 and above (and has been validated on 10.14.6 and above), and any Windows 10 version (validated on 10 20H2 and above).
