Take the tips off.Not the music
A clipper shaves the transient peaks so your limiter does not have to. Crest does it with a real oversampled path, a true-peak ceiling it actually holds, and a display that shows you precisely what it removed — in coral, on the waveform, as it happens.
That is the real plug-in, running in your browser. Turn In up and watch the amber ceiling lines close in on a waveform that never moves — because driving the input does not make your audio louder, it makes more of it get clipped. The coral is what is gone.
Clip first. Limit after.
A limiter that has to catch every stray transient chokes the low end and smears the punch. Take 1–3 dB off the peaks with a clipper first and the limiter barely has to work — which is why every mastering engineer who talks about this in public does it in that order.
Drive the input
The waveform stays exactly where it is. The ceiling closes in on it. You are watching the clipping eat into the peaks, not watching a meter get louder.
Or press Learn
Eight bars, then it sets the Input for you: 2 dB off the peaks, and it will give that up rather than crush your dynamics. It tells you what it did.
Link holds the level
Output follows Input inversely, so driving harder changes how much you clip — not how loud it is. Louder always sounds better. Link is how you stop fooling yourself.
Then limit
Put your limiter after it. It now has almost nothing to do, which is precisely the point of the whole exercise.
Learn does not ask you a question
Most “auto” buttons hand the decision straight back to you: how much clipping do you want? If you knew that, you would not need the button.
Crest’s Learn targets 2 dB of peak reduction — the middle of what mastering engineers actually take with a clipper — and it will take less rather than push your PSR below 8, the point at which a master starts to sound crushed. Hand it something already brickwalled and it clips nothing, tells you it is already crushed, and leaves your Input alone. Then it reports what it did: what it set, what it clipped, and where your dynamics landed.
The oversampling actually does something
Plenty of clippers offer 32× oversampling and then throw the benefit away with a hard clip at the base rate, after the downsampler, where nothing upstream can undo the aliasing. Crest catches the overshoot with a smoothed, look-ahead gain instead. Here is the difference, on a 2 kHz tone driven 6 dB past the ceiling.
| Oversampling | 1× | 2× | 4× | 8× | 16× | 32× |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Base-rate clamp (the common way) | −41 | −52 | −52 | −52 | −52 | −52 |
| Crest | −41 | −66 | −86 | −87 | −87 | −87 |
The ceiling is real
Held to +0.00 dB at every drive, every curve, every oversampling factor. A clipper that can exceed its own ceiling is worse than no clipper: it silently passes overs to whatever comes next.
Nothing below the ceiling is touched
At Softness 0, sub-ceiling signal passes through bit for bit. Turn Softness up and the knee reaches down — by up to 6 dB, and never further. You choose the character; it never chooses for you.
Mix=0 is a bit-perfect null
The dry path is sample-aligned to the wet at every block size and every oversampling factor. If it were off by even one sample the mix knob would quietly dull your top end.
It cannot hurt you
An output guard runs on every sample and cannot be switched off: nothing above 0 dBFS leaves Crest, and no NaN ever reaches your speakers. A fuzz test sweeps every parameter across its whole range, on ten deliberately horrible signals, on every build.
You can see what it took
Four layers, drawn from the real signal either side of the clipper. The pale ghost is your source. The solid body is the level — the RMS, which is the shape you actually read music from. The outline is the peaks. And the coral is what was clipped: the gap between where your source peaked and where the output got to.
The waveform never changes size. Only the ceiling moves.
What is in it
Three days, free, no card
Drop your email and we will send the download. The trial runs for three days with everything unlocked — then it dips the output every few seconds until you enter a key. Nothing expires on your hard drive, nothing calls home.