 Are you tired of your limiter having too many options and making it impossible to set? Just right. Do you wish your limiter would stop letting peaks through when creating audible distortion? Are you yearning for a set-it-and-forget it limiter that just works? Introducing X42 DPL. Hey, I'm Anfa. I'm an electronic music producer and sound designer. However, I only use open-source software and Linux. X42 Digital Peak Limiter, or DPL, is a dead simple limiter plugin. There's a minimum of controls that you have and it just sounds good. I've been using it more and more lately because it saves my time. If there's something I want to spend 30 minutes tweaking, it's definitely not a limiter. As you can see right here, I have the plugin's interface. And by default, it doesn't look like that, but if you right-click somewhere, you can choose UI scaling and also you can resize the whole window. I've prepared a test sound, which is a kick drum that I synthesized using GeonKick, which is a Liber percussion synthesizer. Let me play it to you. This is our kick drum. I've prepared a little analysis set for us in here using open-source plugins as well. I'm going to list them all. On the bottom of the screen, we have an oscilloscope. The green shape represents the original signal that comes straight out of the synthesizer. And the red one, which when overlapping onto the green becomes yellow, is the limited waveform. In the upper right corner, we also have some spectral analysis. On top, a spectral gram and on the bottom, a spectrum analyzer, which will help us detect any harmonic distortion. By default, the plugin is set with no input gain, a limiting threshold of negative 1 decibels, and a release time of 10 milliseconds. I'm going to play the kick drum in a loop and then play with the settings and show you what I mean. If I move the threshold all the way up, you can see there is no limiting. The entire waveform is yellow. That means the original unprocessed signal and the processed signal are identical. Let me move the threshold down. What you are hearing is the limited signal. This is DPL limiting at negative 10 decibels. And you can see that our signal is still very clean. There is no extra high-frequency content, which would be a result of clipping. But we are using a 10 millisecond release time. What happens if I go lower? Absolutely nothing. The sine wave of my kick drum is still perfectly flat, which is pretty crazy. Now, we can also add input gain to push this thing harder. And you can see I'm pushing it 30 decibels into the limiter. And we have an astounding amount of gain reduction applied. But still, the sound is perfectly clean. Aside from these three knobs, there is another control in this plugin and it's this toggle. If I click on this, we're going to switch between detecting sample peaks to detecting inter-sample peaks, which is achieved by adding in four times over sampling to the detection circuit. If I toggle this, you can see there is a very tiny difference in the high-frequency content on the start of our kick. That's because our samples are packed very densely in there. I can actually lower. So you can see this is the initial kick click. If I disable true peak detection, our waveform goes a little bit up. If I enable it again, it goes a little bit down. Because X42 digital peak limiter is actually detecting the peaks between sample points, which we can see on this oscilloscope, as it is also over sampled and provides us with a nice analog view of the sound. All right. What else do we have on the user interface side of things? We have a gain reduction meter, which shows us the peak gain reduction applied. And as you can see, it has a quite a long release time. Let me try it again. And it goes from zero to negative 20 decibels of gain reduction. We also have a nice graph of that. So we can see if I apply... Let me reset this by clicking the right mouse button. Clicking the right mouse button on any control will snap it to its default position. Actually, it will toggle it. If you click right button again, it will move to the previous position. Which is really nice. I can right click to also move the threshold to default negative one position, or hit right mouse button again on it to move it back to negative 10. And you can see if I increase the release time, our gain reduction is not going all the way down. And this will be also visible on our waveform. I'm actually going to reset the threshold and move our input gain instead. Look what happens when I lower the release time. Right now it's at one second. That is very long. As you can see, the waveform picks up way faster and our base tail of the kick drum reaches our limit, which is negative one decibel, true peak, much faster. I can also move the limit up. And you can see we are touching the zero decibel limit. But let's not do that. As you can see, our spectrum stays clean all the way through. There is no clipping. Regardless of how much input gain we put, okay, if we change the control then in the middle of the change, it will clip, actually. That's what we'll introduce. The only little click that we have is actually the result of the synthesis itself. It's just amplified a little bit because we have this nice, we have this sharp corner on this waveform, which could be reduced if I just added a low-pass filter to smooth this out in the Gion kick patch. Alrighty, that is pretty much everything there is to say about X42 DPL. It's an awesome plugin. It's simple. It has a very clean sound. It gets the job done quickly. So everything that's left to tell you is how to get that plugin. You can find this plugin on X42's official website. By the way, X42 is a moniker of Robin Garrius, who is also one of the two main developers of Ardor. And the actual limiter code is based on Fons Andriensens Zeta audio tools. Many of the X42 plugins are based on Fons Andriens's code, like the X42 AutoTune. There's a nice explanation of what this plugin does and how it behaves on this site. And there's also downloads. You can download it for Linux and different architectures for Windows, for Mac. You can also get the source code. Now, these are downloads, and you'll probably get like a tarjizi file. So you will have to manually put this into your LV2 plugin directory on your system. Actually, there's an installation script. But if you search for X42 in your favorite plugin repository, if you're learning Linux, of course, then I'm sure you will find it. That's everything I wanted to show you in this video. If you'd like to see me compare how various limiter plugins deal with the same kick sound and what you can achieve by tweaking the parameters, click on this card right there. With that being said, thank you for watching. I also want to thank everyone who is supporting me financially. Because of these awesome people, I can do these videos. If you, dear viewer, would like to join them and help keep this show going, please go to patreon.com.onfa or liberapay.com.onfa, or you can give me a buck or two every month. Now go and limit some peaks. Okay, that's a nice and short video. And now I'm going to record the... Also, by the way, this is the first video I'm recording in the new DeWater Makeover. You can use it now, you retract it.