either cakewalk fx limiter sucks or i did it wrong

[crosstudio]

alright...

i'm mixing...

i've come to the realization that using a digital compressor won't take care of the peaks that get through before the clamp down...

i add a digital limiter (cfx2) after the EQ and compressor to reduce the peak to a manageable level...

that damn cakewalk limiter is not a look ahead!!!! some of the peak still gets through and it sounds awful.

i ended up using DSP-FX's optimizer instead, which was really made for normalizing and then dithering tracks but with the proper settings and the dither disabled does limiting without adding gain.

 

[AlChuck]

If you're getting digital distortion, the level of your input to the soundcard's A/D is too high, and no plug-in in the known universe can do a damn thing about that. The clipping off of the top of the waveform means that data is just plain gone; nothing you can do will get it back; compressing and limiting will just bring its overall level down in relation to the rest of the data, but it will still sound like hell.