As this week's Free Plug-in, we feature Apogee Soft Limit. It was announced that Soft Limit was going to become available for free at NAMM 2022. Here’s what it is and how to get it.
What Is Soft Limit?
Released in 1991, the AD500, Apogee’s first standalone converter featured an analogue soft limiter which sought to emulate the pleasing effect of pushing tape hard, which was entirely absent from the digital systems which were replacing tape and engineers of the time were reluctant to give up. Soft Limit is a plugin recreation of this analogue circuit which was placed before the A-D conversion stage to gracefully round transients and add harmonic warmth.
Soft Limit has been a feature on pretty much every Apogee A-D converter since, from the AD-8000 to Symphony I/O Mk2 to the latest Duet 3.
Depending on how you use it Soft Limit can do anything from gently round transients through to adding significant warmth or even distortion.
How To Get Apogee Soft Limit
Click the button to go to the Soft Limit product page on the Apogee website, supply a valid email address and you’ll receive a download link via email.
Soft Limit is available for Mac or Windows as a VST, AU or AAX plugin. The documentation refers to an iLok account being required but when we installed it for testing we didn’t need to authorise via iLok.