W1 limiter is free limiter plugin, a clone of Waves L1 limiter, a famous commercial VST worth $200 developed by Waves.

W1 Limiter Free Download

Today we’re featuring a clone of Waves’ famous L1 compressor effect from George Yohng. This is what he has to say about the compressor VST:

George Yohng's W1 Limiter

“W1 Limiter is a clone of Waves L1, with identical output, as well as an approximation of Waves L2.
This was accomplished without reverse engineering Waves products, and the result was obtained by adjusting 4Front YLimiter, by doing the following:
Simplifying release curve
Increasing release time 3 times (see notes below)
Altering softening circuit filter
Waves L1 famous limiter (and thus W1 – for compatibility reasons) uses three times longer actual release time than standard RT60 metric. This means that if you set 50ms release in the limiter, it will actually yield with 150ms standard RT60 release time.
Different engineers recommend different values for release time, the default value is chosen reasonably to provide a smooth limiting for most typical usage of the limiter. If one is not experienced with limiters, it is recommended to keep the default release time.
Current beta version also adds the adaptive release. I tried to replicate Waves L2, however their tangent curve is very complex, so I could only approximate its behaviour (which actually should be quite close, but unlike L1 part, not digitally identical). Waves ARC uses fixed thresholds of 250 and 500ms, while W1 still allows changing release time while in adaptive mode. Also, IDR dithering is not emulated.
Formats included:
VST (Windows, OS X)
AudioUnit (OS X)
RTAS (Windows, OS X).”

W1 Limiter Free Vst Plugins

Download link: http://www.yohng.com/software/w1limit.html