AudioClipper

A saturation and clipping plugin for adding warmth, grit, or aggressive distortion to your audio. Built with JUCE.

AudioClipper lets you push your audio into different flavors of clipping - from subtle analog-style warmth to hard digital distortion. You get four clipping algorithms to choose from, plus tools like oversampling to keep things clean and stereo processing options to shape your sound.

• Tanh - The classic. Smooth, warm saturation that sounds natural and musical. Great for adding thickness without being obvious.
• Arctan - Similar vibe to tanh but a bit gentler. Nice for subtle coloring.
• Cubic - Soft saturation with its own character. Good middle ground between smooth and aggressive.
• Hard Clip - Straight up digital clipping. Flat-tops your signal at the threshold. Use oversampling with this one to tame the aliasing.

Gain Staging

• Input Gain - Drive your signal harder into the clipper (-24 to +24 dB)
• Output Gain - Bring it back down after clipping (-24 to +24 dB)
• Threshold - Where the clipping kicks in (-24 to 0 dB)
• Ceiling - Final output limiter to catch any overs (-12 to 0 dB)
• Mix - Blend dry and wet signals (0-100%)

Quality

• Oversampling - 1x, 2x, or 4x. Higher = cleaner but more CPU. Definitely use 2x or 4x with hard clipping.

Stereo Options

• Stereo Link - Makes clipping decisions based on both channels together. Keeps your stereo image tighter.
• Mid-Side - Process the center and sides of your stereo image separately.

Utility

• Auto Gain - Automatically compensates for volume loss from clipping. Handy for A/B comparisons.

The plugin shows you input and output levels with color-coded meters (green/yellow/red) plus a transfer curve display so you can see exactly what each clipping algorithm is doing to your signal.

You'll need JUCE (included as a submodule) and Xcode on macOS.

# Clone with submodules
git clone --recursive https://github.com/yourusername/AudioClipper.git

# Open in Projucer and export to Xcode, or just open the Xcode project directly
open Builds/MacOSX/AudioClipper.xcodeproj

Source/
  PluginProcessor.cpp  - All the DSP stuff
  PluginEditor.cpp     - UI and meters
JUCE/                  - Framework (submodule)
Builds/MacOSX/         - Xcode project

Built with JUCE