Overview - Loudness Metering Plug-ins And Resources - Part 2
There is a wide range of Loudness meters out there now, so many that we have had to split them across 3 articles. In the second of our 3 part series on Loudness Metering Plug-ins And Resources we will be looking at the iZotope Insight, Avid Pro Limiter with built in loudness metering, zplane PPMulator Plus, which includes loudness metering and finish with RTW Loudness Tools.
iZotope Insight
iZotope’s Insight is a comprehensive metering suite for post production and broadcast applications. Insight provides an extensive set of audio analysis and metering tools, including a loudness section with full history, logging and automation features. Insight, of course, is much more than just a loudness meter with 2D and 3D Spectrograms, True Peak Meters, Stereo Vectorscope, Surround Scope, and Spectrum Analyser as well.
In this free tutorial, I show the essentials of using the iZotope Insight plug-in on Pro Tools for loudness compliant metering and explain how to ensure your mix meets the latest standards, such as BS 1770-3, ATSC A/85, EBU R-128 and more.
Insight Explained From Groove3
I have also produced Insight Explained for Groove 3 so if you are an Insight user you might want to check this out too. In this free introduction, I present an overview of Insight and outlines the common elements used in Insight, like accessing presets, scaling, maximising and minimising the modules and accessing and using the Options.
In the full tutorial series for Groove3 which costs $25, I begin with a thorough introduction of the plug-in (which you can watch for free above) followed by a full look at the Level Meter sections. Next up is the Loudness History Graph and then both Stereo and Surround Vectorscope tutorials. Then the Spectrogram and Spectrum Analyser before wrapping up the series with a Preset Manager tutorial designed to turbo boost your workflow.
Avid Pro Limiter
This is an interesting development from Avid, a true peak limiter plug-in that also includes a loudness meter with a histogram display. However, it only displays loudness in the EBU R128 standard, so for anyone outside the EBU area, it is a useful guide but will not display loudness according to your local standard.
In this review, I take a look at the Avid Pro Limiter concentrating on the loudness metering built into it as the Avid Pro Limiter combines the limiter and loudness metering into one plug-in.
Tutorial - Using Avid Pro Limiter To Deliver Loudness Compliant Mixes
Pro Tools Expert team member Julian Rodgers looks at how to use the Avid Pro Limiter, for people wanting to deliver content to a specific loudness. Julian also looks at the AudioSuite offline loudness analyser feature, a useful tool when delivering to loudness specs.
Zplane PPMulator Plus
This is a low-cost solution from zplane that also has the advantage of taking up very little screen real estate, but doesn't include a histogram feature. It can be set to EBU R128 or either of the 2009 or 2013 versions of ATSC A/85 standards and so between these covers the loudness delivery specs for most of the world.
PPMulator is a cross-platform plug-in meter, which exactly mimics the look and feel of a professional broadcast Peak Programme Meter (PPM) in a variety of broadcast formats. This plug-in provides a calibrated workspace for recording, editing, mixing and mastering and is much cheaper than a hardware meter,
PPMulator also offers EBU R128 and ATSC/A85 loudness metering and batch audio file processing. It offers one of the cheapest Loudness meter solutions too.
- Customisable and resizable layouts and channel labeling
- Audio file batch processing
- Automated peak logging with export
- Mono gain trim to M3 (-3dB) or M6 (-6dB) standards
- Phase correlation meter & Goniometer
- Reference tone generator for meter alignment and calibration
- Multi-channel support up to six channels
In 2015, I took a tour around the zplane PPMulator XL plug-in Pro Tools and found it a versatile cost-effective metering plug-in with options for both loudness and my beloved BBC PPM as well as a number of other options.
RTW Loudness Tools
RTW Loudness Tools offers metering and loudness display plug-ins for mono, stereo, multichannel, and surround applications up to 7.1 at sampling rates up to 96 kHz. All the widely used Loudness, PPM and TruePeak measurements and scales are offered in Loudness Tools.
Anyone who is familiar with RTW’s hardware meters like the TM3, TM7 or TM9 will be at home with these plug-ins. With their 50 years of experience, you will see that the hardware and software products use the same model and RTW have worked hard to make configuration and operation as similar as possible.
In this first free video tutorial, I cover the all the features that are common to both RTW Loudness Tools and RTW Mastering Tools, including how to set them up, either from scratch or by using one of the factory presets. In addition, I cover how to resize the plugin window as well as configure and use of the buttons like Start and Stop/Reset. Finally, I cover how to set up the standalone versions of RTW Mastering Tools and RTW Loudness Tools.
In this second free video tutorial, I cover in detail how to setup and use each of the instruments that come in both RTW Loudness Tools and RTW Mastering Tools. These are the PPM Instrument, Loudness Sum Instrument, Loudness Numeric Instrument, Loudness Range Instrument and Stereo Correlator Instrument.
Loudness Metering Plug-ins And Resources - Part 3
In the last or out 3 part series on Loudness Metering Plug-ins And Resources we will focus on loudness metering plug-ins aimed at the music mastering sector, either for albums or the growing music streaming sector whose delivery specs are based on loudness criteria as BS1770 loudness metering is not just restricted to broadcast workflows, they have a growing range of applications in music production.