I suppose that compressors & limiters will forever be confusing to me. With that said I would like to say “thank you” to the Cakewalk team for the Adaptive Limiter documentation. It’s detailed, not boring, very well presented and doesn’t leave me wondering what I just read. It is obvious that it isn’t a cookie cutter approach & I can actually learn from this! As a PDF I can add it to my tablet for anytime reading.
 
Great work, thanks.

I agree, nice job.

Essentially a compressor with a ratio of infinity:1 becomes a limiter. Even though a dedicated limiter is the way to go.

Sometimes I will use a maximiser to raise the volume without altering the input gain value. How this supposedly works is by increasing the perceived harmonics across the eq bands.