Orra Cream Limiter User Manual

Orra Cream Limiter is a true-peak brick-wall mastering limiter. It makes your mix loud and holds it there without inter-sample overs, using a multiband engine that limits each part of the spectrum on its own, so a bass transient can not pull down your whole mix (no pumping) and every band gets to use its own headroom, which is what lets a master get loud before it sounds squashed.

On top sits Cream, a signature saturation that fattens and adds loudness: tube-warm in the lows, tape-smooth up top.

Two features make it fast. Scout listens to a few seconds of your mix and dials in a mastered starting point, Style, Cream, Release, Stereo Link, and loudness, in one click. Auto Loudness drives the master onto a LUFS target and holds it, true-peak safe, so you land on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube without guesswork.

Everything is metered honestly. An EBU R128 loudness panel shows momentary, short-term, and integrated LUFS plus loudness range; a BS.1770 true-peak meter watches the final output; and a scope draws your waveform against the live gain-reduction trace, so you can see exactly what the limiter is doing and where.

This manual runs front-to-back: start with the Interface Tour, read How the Limiter Works for the ideas the rest follows from, then skim The Controls. The later chapters cover the screens and meters, the one-click Scout, Auto Loudness, and a workflow tips section.

The window is organised top-down on a brushed faceplate: a header strip, a large recessed screen with a meter bridge beside it, and two control cards along the bottom. The header and cards are raised out of the plate; the screen is recessed into it.

A minute on the core ideas makes the rest of the plugin obvious.

True-peak limiting

A brick-wall limiter guarantees the output never exceeds a ceiling you set. Cream Limiter enforces that ceiling on the true-peak level: it oversamples internally and catches the inter-sample peaks that sit between digital samples, the ones a plain sample-peak limiter misses, and that reappear as clipping once your file is converted to analog or encoded to a lossy codec (MP3, AAC). With TRUE PEAK on, the ceiling you set is the ceiling the streaming platform actually sees. Turning it off switches to sample-peak limiting, typically 0.3 to 1 dB louder, with any inter-sample overs shown honestly on the meter.

Multiband, not broadband

Rather than pulling the whole signal down for every peak, the engine splits the audio into frequency bands (how many depends on the Style) and limits each on its own. A loud kick only ducks the low band, so it can not modulate your mids and highs, that removes the pumping a broadband limiter produces, and each band uses its own headroom, which raises how loud the master can get before it sounds crushed. Per-band recovery keeps the low end from pumping while letting the top stay dense.

The trade-off is inherent to all multiband processing: below the ceiling the output matches your mix in level at every frequency, but it is no longer a sample-accurate time-domain copy. Transparent, the cleanest Style, stays closest to a straight wire.

Lookahead

The limiter looks ahead so it can begin reducing gain before a peak arrives and catch it on a smooth ramp instead of clipping it. For this the audio is delayed a fixed 8 ms; the LOOKAHEAD knob sets how far the detector anticipates within that window and how long the attack ramp is, not the plugin's latency, which stays constant. More oversampling means more true-peak accuracy for a little more CPU.

Cream, the signature colour

Cream is a per-band saturation applied after the band split, so its harmonics get true-peak-limited too. One curve family, tapered across the spectrum: tube-style even-harmonic warmth in the lows smoothing to tape-style softening up top, thick lows, silky highs. Because it is peak-normalised, Cream adds loudness: the waveform fattens and the crest drops, so the master gets louder after the ceiling without you having to push the limiter harder. At 0% it is fully bypassed and bit-clean.

The two cards carry fourteen controls; the header adds Scout, presets, A/B and the monitor tools. All knobs are automatable, double-click to default, and double-click-to-type.

Two screen views and a meter bridge tell you what the limiter is doing. Switch the screen with the SCOPE / LOUDNESS tabs; the meters are always visible on the right.

Scout is the fastest way to a finished-sounding master. Start a loud, busy section of your track playing and click SCOUT in the header. It listens to a few seconds of your incoming mix and reads what actually decides how to master it, then sets the plugin to suit and dials in your loudness, a mastered starting point in one move.

What it listens for

Scout measures several independent things about your mix so that genuinely different material gets genuinely different settings:

What it sets

From that read Scout chooses a Style, a Cream amount, a Release, and a Stereo Link to match the material. It then switches on Auto Loudness aimed at your LUFS target (defaulting to −14 LUFS if you have not set one), dials the drive in until the master lands on target, and commits that drive into the INPUT knob so you are left with a finished, static setting rather than a live servo. The overlay walks through Listening, Dialing in, Ready.

Auto Loudness drives your master onto a chosen loudness and holds it there, so you hit a streaming target without hunting for the right input gain by ear. It lives in the OUTPUT card, next to the LUFS Target it aims for.

Because integrated loudness is measured over the whole track, a dynamic master can read a little under the short-term target the servo holds, that is normal, and it is what integrated LUFS means. If you want the integrated figure dead-on for a very dynamic track, aim the target about half a LU higher, or let Cream do some of the loudness so the limiter is not working as hard.

The first time you open Orra Cream Limiter on a machine it needs to be activated. Until it is, an activation panel covers the interface and the audio is muted.

Once activated the plugin works offline; it only re-checks the license when it can reach the internet, and a failed check never locks you out. To move a license to another machine, click the wordmark to open the license panel and choose Deactivate, that frees the slot to activate elsewhere.