Contents
- Contents
- Introduction
- Installation
- Activation
- Overview
- Tabs/Features
- Visualisations
- Controls
- Information
Introduction
V-Clip 2 is an advanced clipper and waveshaper, offering customisable multiband saturation.
Installation
Up to date plugin install instructions can be found at the following link:
https://www.vennaudio.com/installation-guides
Activation
When you first open V-Clip 2 after downloading it for the first time, it will run in a ‘deactivated’ state – this will include a pop up screen alerting that the product is not activated and a periodic voice watermark reminding you to activate the plugin.
The quickest and simplest way to activate V-Clip 2 is to click on the cog wheel menu button in the top-right corner and choose ‘activate V-Clip 2’. Simply enter the username and password for the account you have registered at www.vennaudio.com, select the expiry time (no expiry by default) and then click ‘Just Me’ to activate just for yourself, or ‘All users’ to activate the plugin for all users on the computer.
If you cannot or don’t wish to use online activation, you can instead select ‘Manual Activation’ from the options menu. This allows you to activate V-Clip 2 without the plugin having access to the Internet.
About V-Clip 2’s authentication
V-Clip 2’s authentication works the same way as V-Clip 1; it uses a key-file-based authentication, where a unique license file needs to be generated for your user and machine. To do this, you provide us with encoded plugin and system information, and we use this information to generate a unique key file for you that will always unlock V-Clip 2 on that machine. You can either send us this information through V-Clip 2’s online activation as shown in the previous section, or manually using the manual activation window. The manual activation window provides encoded system information, which you send to us by logging into our website, visiting the ‘activate product’ page under the ‘My Account’ section, and submitting the encoded system information. If successful, this will provide you with license data that you can then copy back to the manual activation screen and save a resulting key file to that computer.
You can also activate V-Clip 2 on multiple different machines, up to a limit – you will be notified about this when this limit is reached. If you are no longer using old activations, simply contact us via our web site to have your previous activations cleared. Once activated, V-Clip 2 does not require an internet connection to remain activated.
In the extremely unlikely event that Venn Audio is about to go out of business we will endeavour to distribute builds without copy protection before the online activation service becomes unavailable so you can use our plugins on new machines in the future.
Overview
Layout
V-Clip 2 has a main ‘outer’ editor containing the global controls, and an inner tab viewer displaying more advanced controls and visualisations of the signal.
The outer controls include global input gain on the left, ceiling (clipping threshold) and output gain controls on the right, along with the main tab viewer and tab selection buttons centered in between.
Above this is the title bar, which includes a preset drop down and save icon for loading and saving presets, a cog wheel icon to open general plugin settings,
and on the top left you may see a bell icon with a notification symbol, but only if an update is available or the update server is unavailable.
Below is the control bar, which contains the main tab buttons to let you switch between different processors, alongside additional plugin controls
which will be detailed later on.
Tab Viewer
There are three main processors you can switch between in the tab viewer, by default it should display the main ‘Clipper’ tab on launching the plugin. You can
additionally click the ‘Multiband’ button to open the multiband clipper editors, and the ‘Emphasis’ button to open the emphasis editor.
Control Bar
Extra functionality which is not tweaking the main clipping function is in the control bar at the bottom:
- Test Signal generation
- Post-clip settings
- Gain matching
- Oversampling
- Dry/wet
- DC filter
- Delta listen (hear the ‘clipped’ portion of the signal)
Presets
Presets can be loaded and saved at the top right of the window.
Plugin Settings
The cog wheel at the top right is for activation, updates and plugin scale.
Tabs/Features
The main tabs of V-Clip 2 are the clipper, multiband and emphasis tabs. Click the buttons below for more details.
There are other tabs for:
Clipper Tab
The clipper tab contains the main wave shaping controls of the plugin. V-Clip 2 actually contains multiple clippers: the main ‘full band’ clipper, and separate clippers for low, low mid, high mid and high frequencies bands. Further still, each of these clipping stages, including the main full band clipper, can be split into two separate mid and side clippers for m/s processing. By default, the multiband and mid/side processing is disabled, and main clipper tab will display just the singular full band clipper. To configure all the clippers at once, go straight to the Multiband Tab.
Along the top left of this view is the band clipper selection buttons (low, low mid, high mid, high and full). Full band will be selected by default and the other bands disabled, selecting a clipper for a different frequency band will automatically enable the multiband/crossover to allow for multiband clipping.
Along the top right is the ‘side’ selection, ‘off’ is selected by default (meaning the mid side processing is disabled). Selecting the ‘both’ button will switch the mid side processing on and display both mid and side clipper components simultaneously. Clicking the ‘mid’ or ‘side’ button shows only the mid or side clipper respectively, and also automatically enables mid/side processing if it was disabled. You can select ‘Off’ to disable mid side processing.
Below these buttons is the main GUI for the selected clipper, which can be split into 4 sections:
The main visualisation will span the entire component allowing you to trace the signal in real time into the waveshaper, and can be interacted with directly by dragging the ceiling point (if in shaper view) or ceiling line up and down, if applicable you can also adjust the softness by scrolling the mouse wheel up and down.
On the left are the controls for the selected clipper processor, such as the input and output gains, wet/dry control and DC offset controls (if asymmetric mode is enabled).
On the right are specific wave shaping controls, including the ‘clip type’ or waveshaping sigmoid selection, the ceiling offset (each clipper can have its ceiling or clipping threshold be at a positive or negative offset from the global ceiling control), and a softness knob (if applicable to the clip type).
Just above these are controls specific to the ‘polarity’: V-Clip 2 allows for independent processing of positive and negative samples of the input signal – this is known as asymmetric clipping. By default the ‘symmetric’ button is selected and asymmetric processing is disabled, however selecting either the positive or negative button will have the right side clipping controls only affect the ‘polarity’ (positive or negative) you have selected, and enable asymmetric clipping mode. If the visualiser is on the ‘shaper’ mode (the default) then this view will be transformed into a dual positive and negative pair of adjustable sigmoids, allowing independent granular clipping control of positive and negative samples.
Along the bottom are the visualisation controls. The arrow buttons allow you to select between 6 different visualisation types: Shaper (default), Waveform, Scope, Spectrum, Envelope and Histogram. To the right are the ‘scale’ buttons, dB (decibels) is selected by default, which will cause all visualisations to indicate levels and scale their rendering on the y axis in terms of decibels (engineers may find this more musically intuitive). Selecting ‘gain’ will switch the y axis to be in the linear ‘gain’ scale, which engineers may find more standard for the waveform and scope visualisations.
The cog wheel in between these two pops up an overlay with a drop down menu to select the desired visualisation, alongside additional visual controls if the selected visualiser allows.
Emphasis Tab
Emphasis allows for more complex saturation by emphasizing or de-emphasizing which frequencies in the spectrum should be subject to waveshaping, which effectively controls the ‘tone’ of the distortion.
The emphasis tab allows you to boost the gain of a selected frequency range before the clipping stage, and then (by default) reduces the gain by exactly the same amount, to
roughly maintain the loudness of the signal as it was before processing, but with the selected frequency range more heavily clipped (or emphasised).
This could look something like this:
Audio → Pre-emphasis (frequencies boosted) → Clippers → Post-emphasis (frequencies attenuated) → Output
The main view displays a circular EQ handle you can drag around, as you raise or lower this you’ll notice the brighter frequency magnitude line will follow trace the path of the handle with (by default) a standard bell curve – this is the signal boost (or attenuation) that occurs prior to to the clippers. In contrast there will also be a darker curve tracing the exact opposite path, this is the corresponding attenuation (or boost) that occurs to the signal after clipping, such that the overall gain of the signal should remain the same. As you drag this handle, you can use the scroll wheel to adjust the frequency curve. Towards the bottom is a settings button 
to customize the emphasis further, including the option to change the filter from a peak filter to a low or high shelf, and to unlink the post clipping filter to allow for independent (or no) post clipping boost/attenuation.
Click 
to hide the settings.
Multiband Tab
The multiband tab shows 4 simultaneous instances of the main clipper/wave shaper processor running across 4 different frequency bands (when the multiband is enabled), as well as the ‘full band’ clipper which clips all frequences after the multiband frequencies are recombined. Towards the top right corner of both the multiband section are two small buttons: a power icon button and a diagonal arrow button. You can use the power button to enable or disable either the multiband clipper or the full band clipper.
You can drag the ceiling lines on each band to adjust the per-band ceiling (offset from the global ceiling) as well as the dividers to adjust the band frequency cutoffs.
There are two display modes for this view which can be changed by the left and right arrow buttons at the bottom centre of the tab: ‘Histograms’ and ‘Shapers’.
‘Histograms’ is the default view which groups sample peaks into intervals, where the width of each bar indicates the the signal amplitude is within that gain interval.
‘Shapers’ is the secondary view, which emulates the ‘Shaper’ visualisation of the main clipper tab. In this view you can drag the ceiling ‘point’ as in the main clipper tab and adjust the softness with the scroll wheel.
Double click the band to pop up all controls for this clipper at the bottom, as well as the precise frequency cutoff. Or alternatively click the up arrow button at the bottom of the frequency band.
Right click any clipper to bring up a couple more options too.
Clipping functions
V-Clip 2 offers a choice of different soft clipping functions, known as ‘sigmoids’, in addition to hard clipping.
V-Clip 2’s Shaper does a nice job of plotting the clipping function so you can see what’s happening to the input and output samples. Below is a description of each of clipping functions.
- Hard: Hard limits sample values to a fixed threshold: values beyond ±T are set to ±T. Produces strong odd/even harmonics and abrupt distortion with noticeable transients.
- Variable Soft Knee: Smooth transition from linear to limited region controlled by the softness parameter (knee width). Reduces abrupt harmonics versus hard clipping; allows adjustable softness.
- Super Soft Knee: The super soft knee applies a smoothing transition in the decibels domain rather than at the linear scale. This results in a significantly wider soft-knee curve than variable soft knee (longer transition), yielding even smoother harmonics and less perceived harshness.
- Quintic: Fifth-order polynomial waveshaper that clips gradually via higher-order terms; produces predominantly odd harmonics with controlled smoothness.
- Cubic: Third-order polynomial waveshaper that soft-clips around thresholds; introduces mainly odd harmonics and mild saturation.
- Sine: Uses a sine-based transfer to compress peaks smoothly; yields musically rich harmonic content with soft limiting.
- Algebraic: Saturates using an algebraic sigmoid function (s / sqrt(1 + (a s)^2)); offering a clean soft knee with primarily odd-order harmonics.
- Arctangent: Soft saturator using the arctangent sigmoid function (normalized) producing smooth, compressive limiting with predominantly odd harmonics and gentle tails.
- Error Function: Uses the Gaussian error function (erf) a logistic-like curve for very smooth, symmetric saturation; produces soft even/odd harmonic balance and gradual onset.
- Foldback: Reflects values beyond thresholds back into range (folding), creating complex harmonic and inharmonic content; aggressive, metallic distortion character.
- Foldback (dB): Foldback implemented at the decibel rather than linear scale, resulting in a non linear foldback for experimental and unique types of clipping.
Visualisations
Shaper
This iconic V-Clip shaper view is great for visualising asymmetric clipping. You get a clear idea of the soft knee of the clipping function and can view the signal before and after clipping.
Waveform
The familiar zoomable waveform visualisation shows the signal over time before and after clipping.
Scope
The oscilloscope view aligns zero-crossings and allows you to visualise the change to the shape of the wave. It also clearly shows up DC offset.
Spectrum
The spectrum display is most useful for multiband clipping, allowing you to zone in on the frequencies you want to saturate.
Envelope
The envelope is a view of the dynamics of the signal over time, allowing you to see how squashed the clipper may be making your signal.
Histogram
The histogram helps you see where in the dynamic range most energy lives, and the overall dynamic balance. Along the Y axis is the amplitude and along the X axis is the amount of energy in each amplitude bin. The red bars show the amplitude distribution before the clipping.
Popped-out Windows
All of V-Clip 2’s components, including each of V-Clip’s ten clippers, can be ‘popped out’ to a separate window. So you can adjust settings without leaving the view you are in, or so you can keep that component’s settings handy as you move around other parts of the main plugin window. The small buttons with the diagonal arrow pointing top right indicates that the component you’re working on can be popped out, click that button to do so. Alternatively you can also right click on the tab viewer button and select popout from there.
M/S Processing
Mid/Side processing works by separating the input signal into separate parts; one containing the ‘side’ information which includes the parts of the sound that differ between the left and right channels to provide the stereo effect, and one containing the ‘centre’ information which is the mono part of the signal – the parts of the sound which are identical on the left and the right. By separately processing the side and mid signals, this allows for the ability to ‘widen’ or ‘narrow’ the sound by making more or less prominent the side information. Each band can have its mid and side processed and visualised independently. Mid is on the left and side is on the right.
Signal Generators
To help with testing and fine tuning your wave shaping, V-Clip 2 comes with a signal generator. In addition to a configurable test tone, V-Clip 2 allows you to select between two different test signal generators using the tab buttons at the top of the test generator window: Test Tone, Noise and Sampler.
In the ‘Noise’ tab you can choose 3 different types of noise, white noise, brown noise and pink noise, which all have different frequency response profiles.
The sampler allows you to load any audio file as a sample, which will play back when the test generator is enabled.
You can adjust the in and out point of the sample using the buttons over the waveform display.
Oversampling
In digital audio, the signal is ‘sampled’ by discreet sample points, which digital to analogue audio converters then use to construct the varying voltage that controls the speaker driver. The resolution of this sampling – how many samples there are in a second of time – is determined by the sample rate, measured in hertz. Issues arise at high frequencies, which imply the signal oscillating many times a second; if this oscillation is too quick the resolution of the sample rate may not be able to accurately represent the true signal. When introducing clipping or distortion more complex tones and high frequency harmonics can be introduced to the sound, but if these harmonic frequencies are higher than the maximum audible frequency of the given sample rate (which is calculated as half the sample rate, or the ‘Nyquist frequency’) then this can result in ‘aliasing’, where these high frequency harmonic peaks overrun the Nyquist frequency and restart from the bottom of the frequency spectrum, resulting in additional and unexpected lower frequency harmonics, and may add undesirable colour to the sound.
For example if a clipper adds an additional 30khz subharmonic tone to the signal, but the sampling rate of the audio is 40khz – meaning the maximum Nyquist frequency (half the sample rate) is 20khz, then this means the sampling resolution is too low to properly record this 30khz harmonic, and instead it will effectively ‘fold back’ to the start of the frequency range, resulting in an audible ~10khz harmonic. For some kinds of audio input/some choices of clipping function, this aliasing will be inaudible. However, for certain signals, aliasing can be a real problem:
In the above image, the main sine tone (the highest peak in the spectrum) is hard clipped and harmonics are produced, with the second and third highest peaks in the spectrum being true audible harmonics. However, there appear signals at a lower level that are also produced – this is the aliasing, a result of the sampling rate limitations and a digital artefact rather than a true harmonic.
The solution to aliasing is to significantly increase the sample rate or resolution of the signal, such that the effective Nyquist frequency is higher and these higher frequency harmonics can then be filtered out before downsampling so that they don’t fold back from zero. This is where oversampling comes in. At 2x oversampling, the aliasing is mitigated by quite a lot and the ‘true’ harmonics are less obscured.
At 4x oversampling, the aliasing is rendered inaudible.
However, if you crank up the input gain and clip away like crazy, the level of the aliasing is also increased.
In this case, higher oversampling would be needed to diminish the aliasing again. Note: higher levels of oversampling requires proportionately more CPU resources depending on the size multiplier, e.g. 32x Oversampling effectively means you’re processing 32 times as many audio samples which requires the processor to do significantly more.
Oversampling requires two separate filtering stages. When oversampling, you initially pad the signal and then run it through a low frequency filter, which effectively reconstructs the signal at the higher desired sampling rate. After processing is completed on the oversampling the signal is again filtered to remove the very high frequency tones that would otherwise result in aliasing when downsampling back to the original frequency.
Filter choice
More advanced users can choose what kind of filtering they would like to use for the oversampling. By default IIR (infinite impulse response) is selected.
IIR
Infinite Impulse Response is CPU-efficient and low latency, but may introduce phase distortion.
FIR
Finite Impulse Response is heavier on the CPU and introduces more latency, but is linear phase and can have better transient response.
Classic
Uses the same eighth-order Butterworth filter as Free Clip, which is quite CPU-intensive.
Offline Oversampling
The online and offline oversampling rates are the same by default, but you can set independent online and offline oversampling rates. The usual workflow would be that you save CPU by setting a lower oversampling rate while you’re working and then boost it for your offline render.
Post-Clip Options
While oversampling is helpful, it also has some drawbacks. One is that it can consume significantly more CPU resources on your computer. The second is that the anti aliasing filter and downsampling that occurs after the clipping stage can result in some sample peaks having a higher magnitude than your desired ceiling. If you want your given target ceiling to be a true brick wall limit that peaks cannot cross, then activate V-Clip 2’s final stage of processing to handle these peaks, making it suitable for use on a final master bus.
V-Clip 2 measures the final output level (optionally detecting inter-sample or ‘true’ peaks) and can adjust the ceiling/output gain or provide an additional hard clip so that the audio just enough to bring the final max peak output down to the desired ceiling – you can choose the maximum to be 0dB or your current ceiling as of activating the post clip peaks over ceiling compensation.
Control of the ceiling and output gain will be disabled while this feature is active. Once you’re happy with your clipping effect and level of oversampling, enable it, play it over the loudest portion of the track, let it make its adjustments and then deactivate it. Post-clip options would normally be used towards the end of a project.
Critical Listening
To retain more or less of the unclipped sound mixed in with the clipped sound, you can adjust the dry/wet knob. There are dry/wet controls for each individual clipper, as well as globally on the controls panel at the bottom of the plugin. This panel also has a few other options for critical listening:
Delta listen: hear/view only the clipped audio
DC Filter: filter DC any offset (which maybe introduced by asymmetric clipping)
Gain-matched bypass: hear the original audio with its gain adjusted to match recorded gain of the clipped audio.
Delta Listen
‘Delta listen’ plays and visualises only the samples which have been clipped. The scope view above shows a clipped sine wave played through delta mode. The quieter parts of the sine wave, which were not clipped, are silenced. The louder parts, which were clipped, are played as normal.
DC Filter
When using asymmetric clipping, you can introduce a DC offset where the average signal ends up unbalanced towards positive or negative. This manifests a loud signal at a very low frequency and in extreme cases can damage audio equipment.
The DC filter function adds a low pass filter to remove this. Since it is a final-stage process, you cannot visualise it directly, but since each clipper has its own DC filter, you can see its effect here in the scope view:
The positive and negative signal is now balanced over the zero line.
Gain-Matched Bypass
If you want to A/B compare the original audio and the clipped audio, you might be tempted to bypass the effect and listen to the original audio. However, if your effect has changed the loudness of the audio, then it’s no longer a very good A/B comparison. The gain-matched bypass feature plays the original audio, attempting to match the loudness of the clipped audio.
Gain Matching
Click the 
button to turn on gain matching.
- Input & Output: When you raise the input level, the output level lowers and vice versa
- Input & Ceiling: When you raise the input level, the global ceiling level lowers and vice versa
- Ceiling & Output: When you lower the ceiling level, the output level rises and vice versa
General Settings
General settings are available via the settings button on the bottom left of the plugin. The general settings tab groups some settings together, which might be easier for certain workflows.
Controls
Level meters/gain sliders
The level meters are combined with the gain sliders. There is one for input level/gain and one for output level/gain.
- Click and drag the slider to adjust the gain, which aligns with the dB scale on the side.
- The moving white line shows the peak level, which aligns with the dB scale in the middle.
- The coloured bars show the RMS level, which aligns with the dB scale in the middle.
- The glowing numbers at the bottom show the highest seen RMS reading. Click to reset.
- The numbers in the box show the gain applied to the signal.
- The red bars at the top show if the peak level went above 0dB. Click to reset.
Global settings
- Input gain: Gain applied to the input signal of the plugin, before any other processing
- Output gain: Gain applied to output signal of the plugin, after any other processing
- Global ceiling: The threshold at which clipping kicks in. All per-band ceilings are based off this one.
Per-clipper settings
- In Gain: Gain applied to the input signal of the clipper, before any of its other processing.
- Out Gain: Gain applied to output signal of the clipper, after any of its other processing.
- Dry/Wet: Mix in the unaffected audio with the clipped audio.
- DC Bias: Asymmetric mode only. Adds a DC offset to the audio before clipping, so the audio will be clipped asymmetrically.
- DC Filter: Filters any DC offset after clipping.
Per-polarity settings
- Ceiling offset: How this polarity/clipper should differ from the global ceiling.
- Clip type: The function used for clipping.
- Softness: How soft the knee of the clipping function should be (soft clipping functions only – variable soft knee and super soft knee).
Information
Credits
V-Clip 2 was created by Jonathan Hyde, of Venn Audio.
- Jonathan Hyde: main developer and project lead
- Adam Newns: development, design, testing
- Samantha Glocker: design consultant
- GUI design inspired by Reza Rizaldy’s work for V-Clip. https://www.deviantart.com/flatheart
Special thanks to:
- JUCE – the framework used to build all our plugins.
- HiFi-LoFi – for their fantastic FFTConvolver Library.
- Klangfreund – for their brilliant LUFS metering library.
Venn Audio is Jonathan Hyde and Adam Newns
Copyright © 2025, Venn Audio
End User License Agreement
Please find an up to date EULA for our software at https://www.vennaudio.com/eula/
Third party License Agreements
FFTConvolver Library
Copyright (c) 2017 HiFi-LoFi
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
LUFSMeter
Copyright (c) 2011-2018 Klangfreund Samuel Gaehwiler
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.