A standalone offline waveshaping clipper for mastering and sound design, built in Rust with iced.
PeakMuncher loads an audio file, lets you shape and tame its peaks with a choice of clipping curves, and exports the result. Unlike a real-time plugin, it works on the whole file at once — so you can see the entire waveform, park a probe point anywhere to analyze it, and split the timeline into independent zones, each with its own clipping settings.
Split the timeline at any point and give each zone its own independent settings — clipper type, ceiling, gain, fades, and DC correction. A quiet intro and a loud drop can be clipped completely differently in the same pass.
Each zone can use any of nine waveshaping curves, from transparent to aggressive:
| Curve | Character |
|---|---|
| Hard | Brick-wall, hardest edge |
| Quintic | Smooth polynomial knee |
| Cubic | Gentle polynomial knee |
| Tangent | Rounded saturation |
| Algebraic | Soft algebraic curve |
| Arctangent | Smooth analog-style |
| Sine Fold | Wavefolder — bright, aggressive, harmonically rich |
| Tanh Drive | Warm, tape-like |
| Sigmoid | Clean, polished logistic curve |
All curves are bounded and pass cleanly through zero.
- Frozen probe-point spectrum — park the playhead anywhere and see a high-resolution (16384-point, Blackman-Harris, frame-averaged) spectrum of that moment.
- Input vs. output overlay — the original and processed spectra are drawn together, with a difference fill (amber = harmonics the clipper added, blue = energy it removed) so you can see exactly what each mode does to the sound.
- Spectrogram view — a whole-file frequency heatmap.
- Per-zone input peak marker on the ceiling slider, showing exactly where clipping begins.
- Live input/output level meters.
- Input gain to drive the clipper.
- Ceiling control (the clipping threshold).
- Oversampling (applied on export) to reduce aliasing.
- Normalize — peak or LUFS, measured over the trim region.
- Fade in / fade out per zone (anchored to the trim window).
- DC offset correction and a DC blocker (one-pole high-pass).
- Trim handles to set the exported region; fades and normalization respect the trim boundaries.
- A/B toggle to compare original against processed.
- Apply to bake changes into the working buffer, with a multi-step undo/redo history.
- Four-tab control panel: Clipper, Levels, Fix, Output.
- Waveform canvas with input/output overlay, clipping visualization, zoom, and sample-level detail.
- Dark theme with KDE-style accent coloring.
Input: WAV, FLAC, MP3, AIFF Output: WAV, FLAC, MP3
PeakMuncher is a standard Cargo project.
cargo build --releaseThe binary is written to target/release/.
- Rust (recent stable toolchain)
- A Linux desktop environment (developed and tested on CachyOS / KDE Plasma). The GUI uses iced with a wgpu backend.
- Open an audio file.
- Split the timeline into zones at the cursor if you want different settings for different sections (optional — one zone covers the whole file by default).
- Pick a clipper curve and set the ceiling for the selected zone.
- Use the FFT/spectrum view to see how the curve reshapes the harmonics — park the playhead on a telling moment (a kick, an exposed bass note) and compare input vs. output.
- Set fades, normalize, and any DC cleanup as needed.
- Trim to the region you want to export.
- Save the result.
| File | Responsibility |
|---|---|
main.rs |
App state, UI, message handling, history, export |
waveform.rs |
Waveform, spectrum, and spectrogram rendering; canvas interaction |
zones.rs |
Per-zone DSP render (clipping, gain, fades, DC) |
dsp.rs |
The clipping curve functions |
fft.rs |
FFT spectrum and spectrogram analysis |
project.rs |
Project save/load |
Actively developed. Working build. See PEAKMUNCHER_HANDOFF.md for detailed development notes and the roadmap.
See the LICENSE file in this repository.