JS: Loudness Meter Plugin (LUFS) in REAPER

hi i'm kenny joyeff welcome to another one of my tutorials in this video i'm going to show you the js loudness meter plug-in in reaper [Music] so the project in front of me and i want to view the final output of this project with a meter now we can add this meter and many other points in the project like on buses or individual tracks but the master fader will be the most likely place to put it so let's go to the view menu and choose the master track then we go to the effects on the master track and click it and we can see our master track effects chain right here notice i already have a compressor on the master track so you can just put the loudness meter after that compressor at the end of our effects chain so let's double click over here and type loudness into our filter and we can see the loudness meter plugin show up right here let's double click it and the plugin looks like this with different meters down here first we have the peak meters which tells us the peak amplitude at the current point in time [Music] and we can see it goes over a bit and we can see how many samples are clipped down here so to reduce these overs let's add a volume plug-in before our meter let's type in volume and choose the plug-in volume pan smoother version 5. let's put it before our meter and then let's reduce the level a couple of db then we'll go back to the meter and see the difference [Music] notice there's no overs now and no samples clipped so that's the peak meter and we could also change that right here hitting this button to be a true peak meter right here and the true peak meter is intended to estimate the highest level the signal could reach after resampling to any sample rate so it could be a bit hotter [Music] now if we wanted to clamp down even harder on our level we could add a limiter to the effects chain let's add the event horizon limiter and let's put it before our meter but after our compressor and the volume and what's limited a couple of db and let's see the difference [Music] let's turn the limiter off for now let's put the peak meter back to regular peaks now if we're dealing with a mono sound or track we might want to switch this to a mono meter and we could do that by hitting this button over here to force mono on this meter [Music] let's put it back to stereo then we have the wafts meters which are frequency weighted and integrated and correspond with the perceived loudness of the signal the first one is the momentary loudness measured over 400 millisecond window [Music] in addition to seeing the level we get a nice histogram over here next we have the luff's short-term meter which shows the short-term loudness measured over a 3-second [Music] window which is why it hangs around for three seconds then we have the luff's loudness range which is the dynamic range of the entire audio signal measured as the difference between the lowest and highest luff's [Music] measurements as we could see this track is not very dynamic then we have the waffs integrated which is the integrated loudness of the entire audio signal from beginning to end and it's generally considered the most useful of all of them if using a streaming service and you're trying to match a loft's level this is the meter you're going to use right now our project is negative 10.5 loves but if we want to make it hotter we can turn back on on limiter and see the difference [Music] notice now it's about negative nine loves and if we go back in here we could turn on or off any of these meters we want and also add some rms meters that are off by default and the rms meter judges loudness based on the voltage of the signal and we have two options momentary with a 400 millisecond window or integrated [Music] and these are both off by default let's put it back to the default and we can see both of those meters but turned off while these are turned on so let's set this up how we like let's keep the peak meters and remove the others just keeping the wafts integrated now we just have those two meters [Music] we could also set up loft's alerts if we want one for yellow one for red and both let's set up one for yellow and set it up so it's triggered at -9 loves so now if this meter goes to negative 9 loves it'll turn yellow [Music] so it turned yellow when it reached that level so we could set up two alarms right here and right here we can choose if our meters reset on playback start it defaults to on but we can turn it off right here and we can force mono right here we're using the button from before and we can adjust the text size or the y-axis scaling right here now right down here is a very interesting feature added to this plug-in we can output the loudness values from our meter as automation or envelopes so if we turn this on over here everything that happens in our meters will be converted to an envelope so let's close this and go to the envelopes on the master track and change the automation mode to right and if we hit play on this project it's going to write automation based on the values of our meter as we can see down here [Music] and now we could use this envelope for other things let's put this back to trim read and let's choose the envelope we want to use we can delete the others let's choose this one and notice the envelope goes up and down based on the level of our meters let's turn on the grid and snapping let's create an automation item out of this alt on the pc option on the mac and just draw now we can just move this to another track let's create a new track and use it as a folder so these tracks will go through the folder track type v to create a volume envelope let's make it bigger let's drag this one down so we could use it for volume let's delete it from the master track as we don't need it there anymore then we could hide the master track another envelope is going to control the volume for all these tracks and we could adjust it by double clicking the automation item we could adjust the baseline to keep it around zero let's switch it to read mode so we could see it in the mixer with the fader [Music] but if you notice this envelope isn't really helpful as it's making the sound louder when it's already getting louder but if we invert the envelope points we could do the opposite and compress our track or mimic a compressor with an envelope so let's select all points and right click and choose to invert all the points so let's clean it up a bit and now we can adjust the envelope with a baseline so it averages around zero and it'll mimic a compressor check it out [Music] and if it's compressing too much we can flatten out the envelope using the baseline and the amplitude slider so it'll control how much compression we get let's bring it up let's hear that [Music] and we could also shift the envelope so plays back later simulating a slower attack [Music] or shifted earlier simulating a look ahead compressor [Music] but it's a great way of generating envelopes we could use for other things based on the volume of our tracks it's just another great use for this loudness meter plug-in which has all the meters we might need so that's pretty much it that's the js loudness meter plug-in and reaper i hope you learned something hope you could use it and i'll see you next time thanks [Music] bingo boys let's go [Music]

Channel: REAPER Mania

Views: 8,382

Rating: 4.9953651 out of 5

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Id: BF3SXuKBolM

Length: 13min 24sec (804 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 11 2021