What is your favorite mastering limiter and why? Have you tried various products and decided to keep one over the others?
My idea of a good mastering limiter is one that makes the music louder and tries to retain the transients.
 
 
 
 
 

I'm in love with the Ozone 6 package meself.

Ozone.
Using a limiter one must not leave too much work for it. It should be more like the last gate keeper.
AFAIK and IMO the basic loudness must be created on the way: arrangement, volume automation, per track compression. If the desired loudness of your track depends mainly on the limiter, the chances for a good result aren't big, I believe,.

LimiterNo.6. It's the most transparent of the several I've tried and own. I like to have Pro-L behind it for the metering and extra isp protection.

I am just a hobbist, I use Ozone 6.
 

Lately, it seems I have been using BT Brickwall Limiter BW2S XP as the last thing in my chain.
Sometimes, if the levels really need it, I will use Boost 11 before it , so I just get any stray peaks knocked down with the BW2S.
A typical master bus Fx chain for me is (Boost 11)> LP-64 EQ (to notch out any weird rings that you might get from stacking up tracks)> then the Blue tube Brick Wall. Nice thing about this setup is you already have all these in your arsenal. Doesn't work for every mix, but if I'm generally happy where everything is sitting, it let's me safely up the levels and has a nice punchiness to it.

totally agree with Kalle.
 
 

I export and pull it into har-bal. The limiting you can do in har-bal is totally different and works more like "riding the faders" than true limiting. Not too many use har-bal or maybe never did. It was a bit controversial at one point.
 
But I've learned how to use it and I like it for getting the loudness and final EQ right.
 
gabo

It depends a lot on the style of the song. For most of my own stuff, I'd be perfectly happy to use any old limiter that happened to be on hand. Seriously. When it's only chopping a few peaks here and there, and you don't set your brickwall right up to 0dB, it really doesn't matter which limiter you use. Heresy, I know. There's so much mystery - and strong opinions - surrounding limiters that's mostly unwarranted.
 
The exception is genres that rely on the limiter to smash the daylights out of a song. In that case, the limiter is touching the sound constantly, so even small differences in how it processes peaks can result in significant changes to the overall sound. 
 
It's really kind of silly to expect a limiter to "preserve" peaks, when its very reason for existence is to beat peaks into submission. But there are some limiters that manage to mitigate the damage by analyzing the incoming material in order to calculate the optimum release time. Ozone is the best at this that I know of, though I'm told that Voxengo Elephant is its equal (if not as easy to use).
 
Pro-L, in addition to calculating program-dependent release times, also takes a novel approach to the attack phase, separating the transient portion from the rest of the peak and processing the two parts with different algorithms. It also has a "Dynamic" mode that applies a transient enhancer prior to limiting, so that even though the peak still gets chopped, the waveform at least rises to that peak more steeply.
 
If you don't use the limiter as an effect but rather as a safety mechanism, then don't waste your money on a boutique limiter. Instead, use a cheap or free plugin such as Limiter No. 6 or TB Barricade, or SONAR's own limiter (just stay away from Boost11).
 
I you want to smash the daylights out of a track or sub-bus, the free LoudMax limiter will do the job. The smash-everything crowd seems to like it on the master as well, but I wouldn't know about that.

i use WAVES L2.
 
it works really well.