I Use This Plugin On Every Mix and Master - Youlean Loudness Meter 2 Pro

hello and welcome back to the channel there's a plugin that I've had on my master chain for about two years or so and I've never actually made a video about it or talked about quite how important it is I always talk about gain staging limiting compression and all that really important stuff but one of the key parts of my chain is the loudness meter I use and why I use it so that's what we're going to be looking at in this video we're going to be taking a close look at the Yulin loudness meter - which is a free fully featured loudness meter and also the pro version which just unlocks a few handy features that can make things a little bit quicker or more easy for you this review is completely unspun surd I'm not being paid to say any of this I've been using the free version for about a year and a half and I recently upgraded to the pro version I do however personally know the developer is a very hardworking very detailed man and he's kindly given me an affiliate link so if you try the free version for a while and you want to upgrade to support the developer and get a few more features if you use the affiliate link in the description I'll get a very small Commission so let's now take a look at this loudness meter why I use it why it's important and how I use it so let's start with the basics once you've downloaded it you install it and you can install a VST 2 or 3 64 or 32 bits you can also install an AAA X plug-in and a standalone plug-in so you should be able to use it in any door or actually as a standalone application on your computer I load it in the last effects lot of my mastering chain so I have the free one and the pro version on the surface of it they're very very similar there's just a few extra things such as some extra presets and some extra sort of customization options which are not essential but they can sometimes help depending on your work so you can resize the plug-in from the bottom left you can see that the user interface is completely scalable and looks amazing up at the top left here there's a view option so you can turn on and off parts of it so if you don't like the histogram view you can remove that and there's a few extra settings including G UI scaling text scaling and also changing the frame rate or these sort of graphic refresh rate I keep it on very high but if your computer's struggling you know you can just lower it it makes it a little bit more choppy but also saves you some extra CPU I do however want to say that this plugin is not a cpu-intensive I should also say this is just a loudness meter plugin it won't affect your mix in any way it doesn't affect your signal chain it simply monitors your signal chain one of the nice options in the pro version is that you can change to this dark theme that makes the whole thing just a little bit easier to look at I use this plug-in in three ways the first is as a real-time loudness analyzer so if I just play audio with it turned on it's starting to give me some data about the song so if I take a closer look at this it's giving me the short-term lui fast the integrated value FS in my sort of data panel here I have my main meter and I also have a histogram that's giving me some more information I'll go into all of this in a lot more detail don't worry I'm glossing over at the moment the second way to use this plug-in and which is only available in the pro version is to take a file either from your DAW or or anywhere on your computer and simply drag and drop it on to the plugin and it will analyze the entire song and if I just scroll out in the histogram view it's analyzed the entire song and it gives me a lot of information about the loudness and all the important details and stats that I need and the third way I use this plug-in is known as a loudness meter but as a dynamic range meter which is this value here and down here in the corner I can change from loudness to dynamic range which is displayed here this is all going to look a little bit crazy but hopefully it all makes sense by the end of this tutorial the reason I use a professional loudness meter like this is because just using DB or DB rms just doesn't cut it anymore I don't know if you've experienced this where you've mastered a track and your rms value seems good but then you compare it to a professional release and your track is just lacking so much loudness and so much perceived loudness and energy using a loudness meter can help you get things into the right sort of ballpark mainly by using L u FS lufs this is different from rms because it applies a filter to the audio before it sort of processes it which means that it's less sensitive to the low end and it's more sensitive to the high end which is more like the way we've actually perceived loudness as human beings and as well as having 100% accurate information about the L u FS values it also gives you information about the true peak value and the dynamic range which are really crucial and making sure that you can actually get your song nice and loud because if you just use RMS sometimes you could have actually pushed a lot more loudness out of it and you could just get a better sounding map mix and master overall first thing I'm going to do is go down to the bottom left and just select a preset and I'm gonna select YouTube so say I'm trying to master a song to upload it to YouTube to get the right kind of loudness out of it I can see that this yellow marker on the histogram has just updated to minus 13 because that's the level YouTube is looking for as an integrated loudness level I'm gonna play some audio through it and start explaining what all of these terms and this data is so at the left we have a main meter this is handy if you want to turn off the histogram view and just see only these two this main meter is giving me information about the short-term and the momentary loudness as well as my loudness range which are explained what that is in a minute this box here has all the values numerically so you don't have to try and read it off a graph and look to the axis so it's just telling me okay that's my short-term loudness that's my integrated loudness and then over at this side I have a histogram which is a graphical representation of loudness over time so at the bottom I have my time vertically I have the loudness in Lu FS and right now what I'm looking at is the short-term loudness I can turn it on and off down here I can look at the momentary loudness which you can see is more which fluctuates more and then I have my true Peaks which are highlighted as these little reds if they get above a certain threshold that I've set I can scroll in and out in this graph just using the scroll wheel of my mouse to change the amount of time that I see I can also move it up and down so that I can see a different data and I can move it left to right to see it in real-time or to let it scroll along like this I can also turn off the short term in the momentary which will just display the true peaks which I can see are below zero here and you can see there's times when it jumps up and down if I go down to the bottom again there's a few different display modes so right now it's elapsed but if I change it to timecode it's actually gonna sync up with where I am in my door so if I'm at 1:30 and press play this says 1:30 as well and that way if I have a true peak that's too loud I can identify the exact second in my ashram it when it peaked louder which is particularly helpful if you're using the free version it's good to play it through for a large portion of your song and then look at the data afterwards but I'm just gonna drag and drop my song into here so that I can analyze the entire thing so let's take a look at the data it's giving me and why any of this is important at all so the integrated Lu FS is important this averages the loudness over the entire track and it lets me know if I'm in the right sort of area so I can see that at times I was below minus 13 at times I was above but overall based on this YouTube will term turn my audio down just a little bit so I'm definitely up to the right threshold that I'm not missing out on any loudness but I could still push it a bit further the loudness range is letting me know the difference between the louder parts of my song and the quieter parts so this is my verse here and this was my chorus and there's quite a big difference in loudness almost 8 loudness units so that might indicate that my song is overall a little bit too dynamic so the macro dynamics between my verse and my chorus might be a little bit much which means that right now I'm gonna have a lot of impact in that chorus but who knows it might even be too much so if you analyzed some professional songs you can see what their loudness range between their choruses and verses are in that particular genre because sometimes I'll be mixing or mastering in a genre that I'm not familiar with you know I don't mix a lot of rock so if I pull in some references I can see what their loudness between the verses and the chorus is I'm when a tool like this makes it nice and simple for me to see that it just makes my life a lot easier I'm just gonna skip over a few here because they make more sense with a different graph and I'm gonna go to the true peak maximum this is the true maximum value that my audio gets to and right now it says it's about minus one point zero dB and if I turn on true peaks at the bottom here I can see the points where it got to that value minus one and this is because I've set a threshold or this preset has a threshold set whereby if the true peak crosses this value it's going to give me a little alert on the graph when the true peak crosses the threshold that a certain streaming site has allowed it means that when that song is transcoded into a different format such as mp3 there's going to be an encoding it might be almost inaudible or it might be an audible distortion or an artifact and this is these are the areas in the mix or I need to look at that and decide whether there's an issue or not to adjust your threshold for the true peak whether you're on your own preset or a different one just right-click this box and this alerts box comes up and you can change the values so if I pull it down and say oh I'll learn me whenever it's minus 3 you can see there's loads of alerts here or I can make it you know only alert me when it's at 0.8 and then it's not going to give me any warnings at all this true peak is extremely sensitive so if it goes over by even a fraction it's going to give you an alert I think I have to stress again just how accurate this tool is it's absolutely painstakingly accurate so you can completely rely on it and trust it I want to go back to the dynamic range which I was talking about a moment ago because right now I've only got information about the loudness but if I head to the dynamic range graph now you don't have the dynamic range graph on the free version but you do still have it displayed there what this lets me know is the difference between my integrated loudness and my true peak loudness at any particular point in time so it doesn't really matter how loud your tract is you could take the whole volume up or take the volume down this is just letting me know the difference between the peak and the average which means that unless you know how compressed your audio is reading this graph higher values less compressed more dynamic when the values get smaller here your tract is more compressed and less dynamic so this track here actually during the vs. is very dynamic and during the choruses it starts to get a little bit less dynamic but after analyzing thousands and thousands of commercial releases typically a good value to be around is about 8 or so maybe a little bit lower if you go much lower to like 5 or 4 that's when things start sounding extremely over compressed and if you're particularly dynamic sometimes a song can feel like it's missing that glue or it just doesn't feel quite so held together but for different genres it's going to vary so this is where you can drag in lots of reference files and actually find out ok if I'm mixing EDM it's pretty much very compressed throughout the whole song and you can try to go for that sort of commercial sound if you want to and having tools like this can also be a good double-check for your ears because I don't know if you know if you've been mixing or mastering all day sometimes it's difficult to hear those subtle differences in compression once your ears are a bit fried and sometimes you can drag it back into something like this and say okay yeah no this is fine or oh no I'm absolutely toasting this this is way too over compressed I need to go take a break and come back to this another time I'm going to go through a few more options and menus so down at the bottom right we can change from mono to stereo to surround sound so you can configure it for your system and what sort of mastering job you're doing at the bottom here I mentioned the presets it's good to keep it on 1 to 8 if you don't have the pro version but the presets on here which will be regularly updated let you know what kind of ballpark you might want to be and if you want like a very loud spotify master or if you're uploading to youtube or to Apple music or something like that and you can also make your own custom presets maybe if I'm mastering an entire album and I want to do it all to sort of a similar standard that's something I might dive into there another handy feature of the pro version is this export here so if I select that what I can do is export all the data into one graph so I can rename this I'll just say song master and then I can choose a resolution say I want it to be a 4k resolution a PNG you know there's all sorts of different options here and then I'm just going to export that in the light theme so let's take a look at this on my desktop so if I look at my master overall it gives me the loudness the dynamic range and although this looks really cool it does actually have a functional use I use this with every single song that I master for a client I will print one of these out to show them what's actually going on with their audio and prove that there's no true Peaks above a certain level that it will transcode prop properly that there shouldn't be any issues and that it's suitable for online streaming even if they don't understand all of these values I find it's a really good way to give a client peace of mind and also give myself peace of mind and it just feels like I'm giving them that little bit extra with my mastering service because most people don't give you like a 4 a graph of what your song actually looks like as opposed to just the the wav file and then back in the plugin again this settings up here there's all sorts of stuff here I'll try to quickly go through it so you've got your alerts so these will change for each preset so you can change where the alerts are for the true peak where your alerts are for the integrated loudness you can you can change absolutely anything to be honest these are maximum alerts and minimum values if I go to the left I can change the colors on the dynamics graph which I'll dive into in a little bit more detail in a moment and I can change my loudness split so right now for Spotify it's saying - 14 L u FS integrated but I can change this so maybe I want it to be minus 23 what I can do as well as change this transition to make a little bit softer so you can see that you can transition it from a hard line to a little bit softer like this and moving down you can change the loudness target which is this little yellow value here so right now I'm saying my loudness target is minus 14 and then based on that loudness target I can change the relative scale of my graph and I know some of this might be a bit too much detail for some people but this is handy so to save me doing loads of maths and constantly you know calculating between minus a and minus 14 minus 6 and minus 14 you can just change the relative scale and then minus 14 becomes 0 and I can just look and go oh I'm six over I'm 3 under easy and there's also a few advanced optimization features but I won't go into these too much something that's hidden in this menu that's actually kind of funny if you click this you lean a lot all of a sudden you have a fun little arcade game that you can play hidden away as a little easter egg I'm typically very useless at these kind of games so it won't be too difficult to be my current high score yeah god I'm useless at it but hidden away there something fun to play if you're completely sick of mastering right back to the serious stuff let's take a closer look at that dynamic range graph so right now I have the dynamic range target turned on which is this dotted line I could turn that off there so if I don't want to have a specific target to aim for and I can change the colors if I go here at dynamics so you can change the scale so that you know if your graphs just here you can make more use of the of the whole graph here and you can change your thresholds so right now I had a set of eight but maybe I want my threshold to be 12 and then it's going to show that I'm getting a little bit more compression right now these color thresholds are set to also letting me know that you know red would be bad green would be good that sort of thing but I can change the values of my threshold and remove them so maybe I only want blue and orange or maybe I only want green and red and I don't want any other colors so you can sort of customize this just to give you the information you actually need to see so there's a lot of simple information that can be displayed by this plug-in you can really dive deep and customize it so that it's perfect for your exact needs what Julian realized with this plug-in is that you know everybody's needs are different some people are just going to need to select a preset you know I want to upload to YouTube but other people have really specific mastering requirements that they need to stick to so now what I'm gonna do is use it in conjunction with a limiter just to see how I might use this while mastering so what I'm gonna do is just press play and I'm gonna select a preset so I'm going to select the Spotify preset so I want to upload to Spotify and what I could see right away the true Peaks are peeking over so I'm gonna set true Peaks on my limiter and I'm gonna pull the ceiling down until I'm not getting any of those true Peaks anymore okay and I'm gonna pull the threshold down and start compressing this so if I now switch over to the dynamic range graph I can see that right now you know I'm I'm probably at a good level those choruses could be more dynamic I also wouldn't recommend mastering just in headphones but I hope this makes sense for now if I press pause what I'm going to do now is actually export this whole song so now that I've mastered my whole song and exported it I'm just gonna drag the file back in to analyze it and what I can see is overall I have an integrated value of minus 9 which is you know pushing it that's that's decently loud I would say and if I check my dynamic range overall I can see that you know maybe I could have a little bit more dynamic range but that feels ok unless just take a look for any true peaks it doesn't look like the true peak ever went over where it should be but now I can really dive into these figures and see what's right for that genre of music and see whether I'm stacking up against all the other commercial releases and that's why I really like this plug-in because there's many things that you can't do with your ears and for everything your ears can't do this is go you covered so I hope this video has been helpful I hope you've learned a lot about this plugin definitely download the free version and I hope to see you in the next video bye for now

Channel: In The Mix

Views: 222,366

Keywords: mastering, mastering plugin, free mastering plugin, youlean loudness mater, youlean, loudness meter review, lufs, loudness explained, lufs meter, mastering meter, free mastering meter, mastering loudn, free plugins, logic pro x, studio one, free plugins 2019, mastering explained, lufs explained, lufs vs rms, pro, youlean loudness meter review, how to

Id: ld11Be_ixzY

Length: 18min 11sec (1091 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 06 2019