Frontier

When you are mixing or mastering your music, it’s important that you don’t leave any extreme fluctuations of volume in your tracks and avoid unwanted distortion. More often than not, this can be achieved with the help of a limiter, a device that you can use to reduce the dynamic range of a track. Thus any audio signal that passes a certain threshold will be attenuated. Although a limiter’s function is identical to that of a compressor, limiters tend to be more powerful and significantly reduce a track’s dynamic range by using higher ratios.

While any digital audio workstation you work with has a limiter in one form or another, it’s never a bad idea to experiment with external plugins from time to time, in order to understand if you can get different results. One example is Frontier, a piece of software that D16 Audio offers for free to any of their registered users.

The plugin dons a photorealistic interface and has just a few controls, thus ensuring ease of use. You can select the control input and the release speed then set the threshold and finally set the output volume. Frontier can act as a soft clipper for your tracks.