v0.1.9

Here's Airwindows Meter v0.1.9, with even more interesting color mappings! I'm sorry the explanation is so long-winded, but this is (for now) literally unique and doing something that's never been done before. Three out of four meters here are unique and the peak meter doesn't work like anybody else's peak meter, either. So, everything that it does, takes some explaining. If you don't want that, just run lots of reference audio into it and learn how to make your audio more like your references by matching the behaviors and colors. That's fine too! Still here? OK, here's how it works.

Top meter is a peak meter. NO RMS, only peak. On modern music it will show just a line of clipped bad sound, with the top of the meter representing 0dB. All the other parts also refer to what's happening to peaks. There's no display of RMS at all: that's for pretty much every other meter, and not interesting here. One exception: bass dots are sized according to RMS, so if you see a burst of green dots you know that's a bass event and can adjust it accordingly. You still want to make 'loudness' in this our modern world, but it is done through making a dense cloud of peaks from 0dB to however far down you like: -12dB or -18dB are not unusual. These are shown as dots: the color dot most likely to give you good results is blue dots. That means the loudness is being balanced by brightness correctly. If you clip there's a discreet red line down at the bottom, but you can still see what's happening with the other peaks.

The second (now half-height) display is a Slew meter. It's showing exactly the same information, but organized differently. On the slew meter, brighter is higher up. (if you have red/green color blindness, 'gred' dots above the blue dots are brighter, and below the blue dots are darker/bassier). On this meter, the red (bright) dots are drawn more obviously, and the green dots are a lot more subtle because it's the 'bright' meter and bassy stuff is the backdrop. This too can produce red warning signs at the bottom, 'over-slews' meaning your stuff threatens to be way too bright to sound good. This meter also gives you a running average of the brightness of your peaks: having bright and dark in balance is good, but you can either balance them or just have everything 'loud' and rely on sonority. That works too.

The third (now half-height) display is a Zero Cross meter. That represents the bass balance: if a low tone is causing the waveform to go many samples without crossing zero, and you make high frequency information louder, you'll interfere with the Zero Crossing and it'll fail to register the bass (just as the listener will fail to hear the bass if you've got the balance wrong). This one's marked in hertz: a line up top shows 200 hz (common for old retro sounds that lack bass, and there'll be a cloud up there if you don't have good bass extension), then there's another line at 40 hz (of interest to dance/EDM producers) and the bottom of the meter is 20 hz. This will immediately show you if your sub-bass is absent or out of control, no matter what speakers you have. The dot size shows RMS here (like the green dots on the Peak meter)
and with a little practice it should speak volumes to anybody needing to work with heavy and deep bass and have it translate.

The fourth display, previously a simple chart for some internal parameters, is now a lot more interesting! It now shows three parameters against a colored background.

Sonority acts like the intensity of the peak loudness. Even if you're not clipping or limiting, if this is high then your music will rip right out of any playback system and make other stuff sound weak. Sonority means every inch of display is packed with blue dots (representing peak energy, lots of it, all of it near the top of the meter). If you had a super-narrow band of solid blue right against the top of the meter, this is basically the same as modern loudenating, just with a slightly better flavor about it and less digital edginess to it (if it's over-bright, the dots will no longer be blue).

Novelty is important. If you have a dense cloud of blue dots, Novelty shows how wide a range they're covering. This can be as wide as 0dB to -18dB or even -24dB (seen in some classic Talking Heads, Parliament, James Brown etc). You'll see the cloud of dots covering more space on the top meter if Novelty is reading a high score, and it's an important part of hit record sounds that are big, wide, open and appealing, not just 'painful to listen to'. This measurement is key to many hit records. Note that you can only get it to work by having something happening at all volume levels at once: just going really quiet isn't going to help Novelty that much. The time period it responds to is roughly like human breathing, but the best way to enhance it is to clean up the mix so it relies on peak energy more.

Intention is the green line that represents the letter score people care so much about: if it gives you a score, that's the highest this line got (there is a discreet reset button top left that will restart the meter). On the bottom edge of the zero cross meter, there are reminders of what these lines mean, and Intention is 'both plus balanced tone, minus RMS'. This is your star quality score, your hit score. You can't make it better just by going louder unless you're simply not using all your dynamic range for peaks. You can balance brightness with bass extension, and you can try to get either the peak density or the range to be greater, depending on if you want to sound loud and aggressive, or open and inviting. Or, you can do a little of everything.

The background color varies to show the 'sound color' of your result. This one I can't make red-green color blindness friendly, but some parts of it will still give helpful information. So, on this, green is your hit record color, but it's your POP hit color. On this background color, red is 'dark' and blue is 'bright'. That makes the green a 'colder' shade of green if it's over-bright, and a red or yellow if it's dark and lacking in treble detail. However, there's one more twist: the green's also modulated by whether Sonority or Novelty are higher. If it's all Novelty and open airy spacey poppy textures, that's a super-bright green, to the point where the line across it goes white. This is very common in hit records. But if it's all Sonority, and still a hit record sound, and still balanced, the meter will go nearly black! And that's also a hit sound, but it's more an underground, metal, aggressive sound, pummeling you with loudness and intensity. And then, another classic sound (heavy rock, old Led Zeppelin) involves having all of these lines very close together, so it's balanced and neither too open or too dense, for a deep green. Remember that Sonority is not just loud peak sounds, but how densely different peaks are packed against each other, and Novelty is how widely they're distributed in dynamics, versus just getting blasted with peaks all of which are loud. In other words, your 'target' might be the brightest green, or total black, or anything in between.

In this version, all the chart lines have the same ballistics and drop back to zero when nothing's happening: only the letter grade stays at maximum. This is a big change from previous versions, but it's producing much more reliable ratings than before, so I'm prepared to put it out and get back to using it for a while, rather than simply developing it. I'm confident that working actively with music's peak energy will work out well for people. In fact, I'm looking to integrate a version of this into ConsoleX when I've finally got that ready to go: there won't be room for the whole thing, but I think I can do a '2-d' version of a Novelty meter combined with the blue/red/green peak coloring and have something that'll show useful information in a much smaller space.

Deciding to make slew and zero cross half-height turned out great! Thanks to Jrel at gearspace for the suggestion. Meter v0.1.9 should fit much better on a broad range of screens: it doesn't really lend itself to being resized but ought to handle it fairly well, in particular it ought to work at many different widths and still function. I hope this gives you a new window (indeed, an Airwindow!) on your sound, as it does for me.

v0.1.8

Here's what's new in version 0.1.8! Meter now focuses entirely on peaks (RMS is used for some internal calculations and the size of the dots in the Zero Cross section).

Each section is labeled: Peak Loudness, Slew Brightness, Zero Cross Bass. They all show red, blue and green dots. It's always the same data, just arranged differently, like this…

Peak Loudness shows the dots on a dB meter (labelling the horizonal lines as -6, -12, -18, -24, and -30 dB). This is the same as a normal RMS meter, except it's only showing peaks: if they are not showing up at the bottom of the meter, the RMS loudness is too loud to let them go down there.

Slew Brightness arranges the dots by slew factor, so brighter ones will be higher (as a rule).

Zero Cross tracks how long the audio could go before crossing zero, so this is not only presence of low bass, it's also about whether there are higher frequencies to interfere with that bass. It's also labelled now, at 200 hz, 40 hz and 20 hz (which is the bottom of the meter). Again, it tracks not just whether bass exists, but whether it's allowed to dominate. If you notice, there are lines higher than 200hz around where the 'Zero Cross' label is: those lines are 2k and 20k, and most audio shouldn't even get near there for zero crossings. Refer to music you like as a reference for how this ought to look.

There's a line of text now that tells you about three things: the original Loudness measurement (which isn't RMS, it's the raw density of how many peaks are present), a new measurement for novelty (how much the pattern of peaks changes, making a different sound), and a measurement of how many bright, loud, and dark peaks happened. Dark peaks aren't always bass, they're just peaks where the slew isn't high enough, just as bright peaks are all slew and treble. Meter now keeps track of this to tell you if you're over-bright or over-dark.

And there's a rating, like there was before. But now it's not 'peak loudness'. Now it's novelty MINUS peak loudness and MINUS how off-balance the bright/dark peaks are. The idea was to track down roughly how striking the sounds were, even though Meter doesn't know what a note is or understand music per se. Turns out, this new Meter is very good at singling out breakthrough songs that broke a big act (for instance, its favorite Led Zeppelin track is Good Times Bad Times) and career-making records like Sergeant Pepper. It likes punchy, dynamic music like the B-52s and the Beastie Boys and Chic. Its favorite Aerosmith track seems to be Walk This Way, and it's sorted the Yes tracks I've so far recorded, into a list that is almost exactly sorted by record sales.

If you think that's interesting and want to mix stuff to make Airwindows Meter happy, the results you get will probably sound good once you're done. I can't make it give you Top Ten hits, that stuff was back when we had a record industry. But it can help you get striking and exciting sounds. You can also use it to match other music you know: study the meters and make your music match what you see on your target music and that should help. But to pursue hits as Meter understands them, allow for a bunch of headroom and then use up ALL that space with peak energy. It likes things a little dry, not loads of reverb, and it likes it when the arrangement leaves spaces: if possible, space like the song is breathing in tempo with the desired music. Definitely pay attention to whether bright/dark is out of balance, but you can either go for the hi-fi sound of bright/dark peaks, or you can just try to make all the sounds peak out as loudly as possible, which means mixing everything to be loud and sonorous. Both work.

There's more tools coming for working with all this, but this is a good update for being able to keep track of what you're doing with all those plugins. If Meter breaks or fails to work for you, I'll try to get help as to fixing it: I'm out over my skis working with JUCE but with the help of the Pamplejuce framework, I can try to provide GUI plugins. Have fun!

v0.1.7

This is a way-station towards what became 0.1.8. If you're curious, you can try it, but it'll have issues that were resolved in the official release. In particular, I think this is the one that draws all the colors as bright magenta :) the ratings are still the same though!

v0.1.6

This is a way-station towards what became 0.1.8. It's really v0.1.6, except the versioning is screwed up and it doesn't have all the labelling right and probably isn't doing the song-rating properly yet, but it was a successful build, so here it is :)

v0.1.4

The changes to this release are as follows: I've removed that little slider for 'vibe vs hype' because it's become clear that, instead of making the meter go high for various purposes, you must actually aim the meter's line at different targets to accomplish different things. For that reason I have a little clarifying text: you've got basic categories representing music purposes.

A - Attention, B - Biggest, C - Comfortable, D - Deep Vibe, E - even more chill.

(note from much later: all this translates to what is Sonority in the current version. It doesn't have any concept of novelty, so it's more or less 'purely peak loudness')

The meter actually works the same, but I've turned it loose on over 400 kinds of hit single across more than 80 years, from vinyl to CDs to hi-res downloads, and because you have to be able to aim the target line, I made it change color as it goes. The line's color reacts quicker to the same information coming in, so if it goes green it's aiming for 'mass appeal' and if it switches to blue it's aiming for 'attention', and then the position of the line will follow. That's more information coming in, so let's go over what these categories actually mean.

A can also mean Alienating, especially high A like AA rating. This is the stuff that can catapult an act into stardom or define their greatest (but not always best-selling) album. Examples: Birthday by the Beatles, Strobe by Deadmau5, I Feel You by Depeche Mode, Crazy Train by Ozzy, And You And I by Yes, Sabotage by the Beastie Boys, Dawn Chorus by Boards of Canada all have this sound. The energy level is like a wildly cheering screaming crowd. You can easily break this by distorting too hard. All My Life by the Foo Fighters would be AA rating, and is clearly trying to be, and then the last minute of the sound goes into loudness war distortion and it tops out at AC rating: it's clearly not intending to lose energy at the end, but it goes flat with distortion that wasn't as present before, and the energy falls off a cliff.

B is where you aim when the purpose isn't maximum hype at all costs, where you have other moods to express than raw excitement, but you still want the hugest hit possible. This region is loaded with Beatles, AC/DC, Boston, Eagles, U2, The Police, Nirvana (early CD masters), Springsteen: where A means you're pushing yourself to the limit of human expression and endurance, B means you're a musical athlete and you're laying it down. It's outperforming, but not so's it hurts. B tier is just a little more relaxed than A tier, so it sells better, but doesn't change people's lives as much. Biggest is probably where you aim if you want to make money and sell tickets, if you specialize in A tier you might stay more obscure: more is not always better. Bigger can be better.

C is arguably even more mass market (always assuming your song and beat is good: the meter ONLY knows about energy level as expressed in peak energy relative to slew). The spectrum is enormous, from Fleetwood Mac to Van Halen to Springsteen's hugest hits to the Police at their peak. You get the biggest hits from Crosby Stills and Nash, the Doobie Brothers, but you also get tracks like Everlong by the Foo Fighters, which is clearly trying to be AA rating but is squashed completely flat by distortion and limiting and ends up solidly CD rating (perhaps with more popular appeal because this smooths the hell out of it?) and hitting the market like a C tier, not an A tier. There are no Top Ten hits that are also AA rating. It's too much energy, you only start seeing Top Ten hits at AF and below, at energy and intensity levels that are more palatable to a broad audience. C tier is where that lives, in a big way. Corporate rock? For that reason, if you're designing a song towards an intention other than hype, you can adjust things to aim for C tier instead of just 'more'.

D tier is interesting because you've got to aim for it in multiple ways. It's sparser arrangements (though not always gentler), it's the domain of chill, and you can have enormous hits in D tier as well. Dreams by Fleetwood Mac is DC rated, open and spacious, never straining. Bruce Springsteen's I'm On Fire is DF. The Police's Wrapped Around Your Finger is DB. (Every Breath You Take is CE). James Taylor's Mexico is DA. This is where there's still life to the song, but the vibe is something you can bathe in: in this tier, if you add too much to the arrangement or push things too loud you ruin it, but there's typically still a lot of activity, it's not just quietness that produces D tier top ten hits. Neither Dreams nor Wrapped Around Your Finger consist of silences, they're just very sparse and open compared to heavy rock.

And lastly, E tier is actually hard to reach! On a track with peaks normalized to or near 0 dB it's hard to get here. Pink Floyd's Another Brick In The Wall comes very close (DF) through sheer dynamic range and having most of the song incredibly quiet. Crosby Stills and Nash's Guinnevere is EA. James Taylor's Fire And Rain is EB, its loudest sounds being timpani-like tom rolls for effect. Pink Floyd's Grantchester Meadows almost defines the E tier, remaining a great and moving song while sung at barely a whisper, with its energy levels almost nonexistent. E tier probably means you've intended to aim there, and worked hard to restrain anything that might break the stillness, because almost anything you do will end up between D and B tier depending on how full the sound is: you don't get E tier by accident, and you won't get a hit record out of it. But if you were looking to soothe the savage ear, you might lean this direction.

Enjoy the plugin, whatever your goal :)

v0.1.3

So here's my description for what we did today.
The top meter, Peak/RMS, now has better clipping metering. There'll be a red line if you clip. You can probably get away with clips UNLESS the red line extends so far down that it intersects with the dark grey area reaching up (RMS) and if those cross, it's almost certain to be too loud. If they don't cross, the clip is probably not going to be too obtrusive.
The middle meter, Slew, now is color coded. If you see red dots, that's the part that is brighter than optimal, green dots are the part that are duller than optimal. One way to get a good sound without going full 'hit record blue' is to make it so there's an even cloud of red and blue dots going on at all times: do that across the whole meter without pushing the slew too far (into the black spikes that come up from under the meter) and you'll have a good sound even without blue Hit Record sound.
The bottom meter, Zero Cross, now is set up to track RMS loudness way more than 'hit record sound', and this caused it to do a much better job of drawing what's actually happening. So, if your mix shows big heavy blotches in a frequency region, you can back that region off: if it's super evenly balanced and you're not getting the excitement of older rawer stuff, you can let some things poke out more.
A good work day :)

v0.1.2

In this update, I'm amending the letter-grade thing so it's a two-letter grade. This is because what I was doing, having it top out as AA and AAA and AAAA was cumbersome and for the stuff I was measuring, AA was getting incredibly cluttered, with no distinguishing marks between the stuff in there.

So now there's a main letter and a sub-letter, all between A and F (also like grades). And this changes things, since it's not nearly as easy to get to an A grade as it was, but there's a lot of sub-categories. Therefore, think of the initial letter like this:

F probably means you don't have a hit record sound. Too little happening.
D means Dull, perhaps, or Different, or the Density of your sound is just not enough: too much space, or bass?
C is the first passing grade for hit record sound, you're in perfectly fine company here.
B is Best Hit Record Sounds and everything here probably vibes like a hit on first listen.
A is Attention-grabbing, which also means you need to be OK with that being the primary focus.

So that should help make sense of what's happening. It's not a 'good music' meter, it's specifically a Hit Record meter, meaning you can approach it from many angles but the highest of scores will always mean a certain kind of energy and attention-hungriness. If it's that you want, this can help narrow down how to get there. And anything over a C grade is fine, the rest is just about how needy your sound is of being a mega-hit. Also, these readings are based on the default Vibe/Hype setting, so that can be changed too. Have fun!

v0.1.1

Today I added other things to the Vibe calculation, allowing it to 'focus' on much softer hits such as Fleetwood Mac's "Sentimental Lady' if you pushed it in that direction. Hype stayed the same but Vibe got WAY more effective that way. Then, tried to find the optimal balance for this and checked to see where Mutt Lange's work sat in relation to that, and it seems that if you set the control to represent 0.618 you optimize for Mutt, meaning you optimize for mass mainstream appeal without trading off too much edge.

And so we did: it now defaults to that setting, but you can alter it to whatever target you like :) that said, I'm happy with the new target as the 'optimal mass mainstream hit record setting', just know that you can lean it in other directions too.

v0.1.0

I've added a slider that lets you tune the Hit Record Sound between Vibe and Hype. Vibe lets more mainstream stuff in, where the original algorithm, Hype, tended to steer you towards ONLY the most overwhelmingly intense hype records possible. None of this changes the RMS, Peak and Slew and Zero Cross measurements: it's all about how they're combined and weighted.

Defaults to 0.5 on that slider, which I think is a good general setting. If you are adjusting a mix using this and you know the target energy level for your song or genre, by all means adjust it to represent what you're most striving for. The reason it's Vibe/Hype is because you will sacrifice vibe by going for too much hype, so choose wisely :)

v0.0.9

Still updating Meter, in this case to make it respond appropriately to bassy stuff like old Rolling Stones or whatever. Much work on the hit record line, which probably isn't going to be always sailing into the top meter, but when sufficiently provoked it can nudge it :)