New Music Gear Monday: FireSonic FireMaximizer Plugin

We have a lot of tools that do a great job of increasing the mix level, giving it some extra harmonics, and controlling clipping, but that usually means that your mix buss can be filled with plugins. Software developer FireSonic has now put four popular buss plugins into a single plugin called FireMaximizer to provide you a wide range of flexibility from a single UI.

Lots Of Firepower

FireMaximizer provides a clipper, saturator, limiter and multiband limiter in one plugin, then allows you to blend between them to get the exact ratio of digital and analogue grit and transparency that your track needs. A 3D display makes it easy to blend between them all by dragging between all the different algorithms. The amount of the effect is controlled by a large Drive control on the left of the plugin.

As with most digital limiters, a Ceiling control establishes the highest level of the output to prevent unintentional clipping. This is used in conjunction with the Clean and Look-Ahead controls, which allow you to adjust the distortion artifacts that can occur during severe limiting.

You can also change the internal resolution of FireMaximizer  to achieve better quality results using the onboard Oversampling selections that vary from Off up to 16x. As with most oversampling, the higher the selection the cleaner the sound, but the more computer horsepower is required.

FireMaximizer will handle any sampling rate, and also intelligently detects whether processing is occurring. If none, it temporarily turns on sleep mode, meaning it requires virtually no CPU power at all, thereby saving computing resources which can be used for other processes.

FireSonic’s FireMaximizer is distributed by United Plugins, and has a special introductory price of just $31 instead of its normal $129 price until the end of February. There’s also a fully functional 15 day trial version available.

You can purchase it or find out more here, or watch the video below.

---