Production Advice

( Or, how to NOT smash it to hell ! )

Update – I wrote this post a few years ago now, and the TT meter is no longer the only kid on the block – although it’s still a great choice. To see a new video round-up of some currently available dynamic range meters, click here.

Loudness has always been an important topic in mixing, and especially mastering – never more so than today.

Knowing how loud is too loud has always been difficult. I’ve written before about how we hear loudness, and different software solutions for measuring loudness - but now, everything has been made far easier.

Recently a new tool has been released, purpose-designed for measuring the loudness of music. You can now see at a glance how loud your mix is, make informed decisions about compression and limiting, and choose to make your recordings punchy, loud and competitive.

And best of all – it’s free. (*)

(*) Kind of

This tool is the TT Dynamic Range Meter, released by the Pleasurize Music Foundation. It comes in two flavours – the one in the animation on the right is the real-time plugin version, available for both Mac and PC now, in AU, RTAS and VST versions.

There is also a second, off-line version of the meter, which generates an overall DR dynamic range measurement for a complete WAV file or CD and allows you to generate a log file, which can be submitted to the (unofficial) Dynamic Range Database.

The real-time plugin version shows peak and RMS level metering for the left and right channels, but also a measurement of the dynamic range – the difference between the loudest and quietest parts of the music – in the centre, labelled “DR“.

Broadly speaking, the idea is to keep the dynamic range as wide as possible – up to a point, at least.
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