Mesa Lite, KLYP, XMTape&Clip: Free Plugins of the Week
3,0 / 5,0 | 
Mesa Lite, KLYP, XMTape&Clip: Free Plugins of the Week · Source: Venomode, Voidstar Audio, Xilentech
Free Plugins of the Week
This week’s round-up brings you not one, but three useful free clipper plugins: Mesa Lite, KLYP, and XMTape&Clip. Free plugins—or should we say: free clippers—of the week!
Venomode Mesa Lite: Free Soft Clipper with Excellent Metering
Mesa Lite by Venomode is a free clipper plugin designed to increase the loudness of your tracks by controlling peaks. In addition, it can add saturation to help with warmth and glue. The developer says that the plugin uses 4x oversampling, which helps to reduce aliasing. Mesa Lite is the free intro version of the paid and much more powerful Mesa plugin (£29).
While Mesa Lite doesn’t reinvent the wheel, I really like the clean and uncluttered GUI and comprehensive metering. In addition to Peak and RMS input and output meters, there’s a waveform display that shows the input, output, and clipping in realtime. This makes it easy to spot peaks and adjust the clipper accordingly. You can also control the rollover of the clipper around the threshold level, allowing for anything between a super-gentle soft roll-off to hard clipping. Useful and versatile!
Mesa Lite is available for macOS, Windows, and Linux in VST, VST3, AU, and AAX formats.
Voidstar Audio KLYP: The Everyday Soft Clipper
Next up is yet another free soft clipper plugin with a very nice, intuitive GUI. In addition to a realtime waveform display, KLYP by Voidstar Audio has a clipping curve graph that doubles as a peak meter. Together, the two displays provide an excellent visualization of what’s going on. To adjust the threshold, simply drag the red line.
In addition to the pre-gain and threshold, KLYP lets you adjust the softness of the clipping curve. You can also select up to 8x oversampling and antiderivative antialiasing to achieve a super-clean sound.
KLYP is offered on a pay-what-you-want basis. While you can get it for free, the developer suggests a donation of $10.
KLYP is available for macOS, Windows, and Linux in VST3 and CLAP formats.
Xilentch XMTape&Clip: Free Tape-Style Clipper
Completing the trio of clippers today is XMTape&Clip by Xilentch. According to the developer, the goal was to design a clipper that behaves like real hardware, while providing the flawless precision and clarity of digital.
The simple GUI consists of large input and output knobs accompanied by a pair of corresponding meters. While you cannot adjust the curve, Xilentch says that it has a unique shape that responds slightly differently to the left and right channels, thereby emulating the behavior of analog hardware.
XMTape&Clip is available for macOS and Windows in VST3, AU, and AAX formats.
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