drewfx1
When your audio leaves your DAW, anything over 0dBFS is going to be clipped at 0dBFS anyway. 
 
A limiter inside your DAW set at 0dBFS might make it sound a little less ugly when it starts to clip, but that's about it.

This was my understanding as well. Where this can fall through is on an interface like mine with an internal loopback (external cabled loopbacks may also cause this). I read some warnings about monitor configurations when doing this, but not sure if it will bypass this internally as a result (no desire to test such a thing, just in case it does).
 
Ultimately, in any loopback situation, it is often best to mute the armed track so it is not contributing to the output; and monitor levels should be set to zero while doing such routing and then brought up slowly to verify "expected results" first.
 
 

Great discussion here everyone, I appreciate it.   This is making me question what I thought I knew about limiters now though.
 
I really thought that if I have a software limiter on my master buss, but its set to a ceiling of -0.2db and the threshold is set to 0db, I truly thought the limiter is actually doing NOTHING, but stopping anything going over -0.2db!   I didn't think it would color the audio or do any compression/limiting until -0.2db is reached!

Am i wrong here?  If so, how?
 
I also use a limiter to make temporary mix downs so I can listen in the car as my project progresses and think of new ideas.  I use a limiter with some threshold just to get the audio loud, should I not be?
 
Thank You,
Adam

alewgro
Great discussion here everyone, I appreciate it.   This is making me question what I thought I knew about limiters now though.
 
I really thought that if I have a software limiter on my master buss, but its set to a ceiling of -0.2db and the threshold is set to 0db, I truly thought the limiter is actually doing NOTHING, but stopping anything going over -0.2db!   I didn't think it would color the audio or do any compression/limiting until -0.2db is reached!

Am i wrong here?  If so, how?
 
I also use a limiter to make temporary mix downs so I can listen in the car as my project progresses and think of new ideas.  I use a limiter with some threshold just to get the audio loud, should I not be?
 
Thank You,
Adam

 
Easy enough to test for yourself - put the same audio on two tracks one with the limiter the other not.
Then sum the two channels, one with phase inverted.
 
Anything coming out is due to the limiter.
 

alewgro
I really thought that if I have a software limiter on my master buss, but its set to a ceiling of -0.2db and the threshold is set to 0db, I truly thought the limiter is actually doing NOTHING, but stopping anything going over -0.2db!   I didn't think it would color the audio or do any compression/limiting until -0.2db is reached!

If it's a hard knee limiter, it should be doing little or nothing to your audio until the threshold is reached (it might well be doing upsampling/downsampling, but hopefully this would be done well enough to not be audible). But a soft knee response will gradually start compressing well before the threshold is reached.
 
However, as we have been discussing, a limiter used this way might not be of much help either as your audio interface is already clipping anything over 0dBFS. You would need something that responds in a fairly specific way to accomplish what we are looking for here.

it acts as an upwards compressor at those settings.
 
color, indeed.
 
i use it that way often.