New Features in REAPER 6.30 - Render Normalizing and more!

welcome to another reaper update video today we're talking about reaper 6.30 and there's a bunch of new changes related to normalizing when rendering as well as lufs metering within the tracks and much more let's check it out and if you missed any of my previous reaper update videos there's a link in the video description to see the full playlist up first let's look at loudness normalization when rendering reaper now supports normalizing the rendered files except video files to target peak true peak or loudness whether it's rms or lufs also normalizing rendered stems to master peak or loudness when rendering it will calculate and display the peak the true peak clips and overs rms l ufs loudness range for each rendered file and it will show an overview of those statistics at the end so let's look at that we've got a project here ready to render i'm going to make a time selection here get my entire project range and let's go a little bit extra and i'm going to go to my render window and so now we see this new box normalize which brings up some options like normalize to l ufs max so that's short term uh is going to find the peak short term and then normalize the rendered file to that lufs max which is momentary max peak true peak peak rms integrated and l ufs integrated normalizing when you render is kind of a touchy subject a lot of people are doing this wrong i think they're mastering to a particular target because they think that's optimized for streaming it's really not but there are certain situations where l ufs normalizing when you're rendering is important or peak normalizing or anything like that it's it's not for every render that you do you shouldn't be using this for every situation there's certain situations like game audio sound effect assets let's say you're making ambient sounds that go in the background of a game and you want every single ambient file to be at -30 lufs you can you know mix them the way that you like and then that normalize just gets them in that minus 30 sweet spot that you've determined is where they sound best if you want to know more about loudness targets and why you shouldn't use them check out the podcast that i'm on the mastering show podcast with ian shepard and uh yeah we we've been covering it for years and years now and it's you know we still find people confusing those things on a regular basis so back to this window so i've got this mix and i want to render it and i'm not sure what peak level i want it let's just say i want to make sure that the true peaks don't go above minus one okay so we're going to normalize to true peak at a target level of -1 and all the other settings we're going to keep the same pretty much going to do a 24-bit wave in this case we have two options here there's a dry run which is just going to quickly render the project and show you the statistics so let's do that so master mix and time selection and dry run and in this window we see the waveform being generated also something that's new here is that there's a percentage when uh when you're rendering how far through the project is rendered and here is the statistic so we've normalized to minus one and so the peak the true peak is at minus one there's no moments in the project where it clipped the rms level is minus nine the loudness range is 8.5 and lufs integrated is minus 13.3 and we hit the info button there's a bunch more info about what's being displayed here which is really nice to see so that's a dry run render it didn't actually render anything to uh to a new file but it's very helpful if you're not sure what the ideal kind of integrated loudness could be but again watch out for normalizing music to certain loudness targets we can also select a bunch of tracks here so i'm going to select these tracks but not this track so these are drum tracks and if i go to render and go to source master mix plus stems and within the time selection this normalize window here is a little bit different because there's now this option to normalize stems to the master target so it's going to generate a master mix plus each stem will also be normalized to a specific level there's probably a very specific situation where this is uh what this is made for but i can't think of it normally when you're rendering stems you want them to be able to reconstruct into your master mix but if you do this and you normalize everything then all your balances are going to be changed so i would not recommend using this option unless you know specifically that this is the right time to use it because most likely it's going to change your mix if you try to rebuild it from stems so i just want to show that that option is there but maybe don't use it i want to show you what rendering a sound effect library looks like when when using to normalize so in this project i've got some recordings of water sizzling and i'll just play that back for you so when i was rendering these files for my sample library i did a dry run render with normalized to minus six peak i like my samples normalized to minus six and being able to do this take my source recordings process them the way i like normalize them to minus six that gets me lots of headroom to use them in other projects using the dry run render i can see there that there was one peak that actually clipped before normalizing down to minus six that's a situation where i think that using a limiter in there is a good idea so i'm just going to close this and so instead of having to export the file and then import it again to see if there's any clips using the drive run render i can quickly do a silent render and see if there's any peaks so i know that this peak here is potentially a problem and throws off the normalizing of the entire file so simply i'm just going to add in a limiter here so all this limiter is doing is shaving off the peaks if they get to this level here so that's on the master track and now if i do the same thing i'll do a dry run render and now there's no peak there two or three seconds in and overall it's going to be a more consistent sound level so that limiter barely does anything but just shave off that that quick short peak there that loudest point and then we're good and moving on there are actions now in the action list for calculating the loudness of the selected items tracks or selection via a dry run render so like i showed before there's a way to create a dry run render where no file is created but you get those waveform statistics and so let's look at that in the action list i'm going to open up the action list we're going to search for calculate and so we've got calculate loudness of master mix via dry run render master mix within time selection loudness of selected items including take and track effects and settings loudness of selected tracks via driver and render and calculate loudness of selected tracks within time selection so we can select the track and calculate its loudness or we can select an individual item and analyze that including everything upstream from it so i've got a midi item it's my hi-hat here and i'm going to calculate the loudness of the selected item including taken track effects and settings via dry run render and so with an item like this it's super fast but i can see here that ldfs integrated minus 39 so certainly uh not a problem definitely not in danger of clipping or anything like that so peak level minus 21.3 but yeah it's cool that you can grab an individual like midi item calculate the peak as it goes through the rest of the effects chains and let's do just this section for the master mix and so it looks like it's peaking at speaking at zero or just about zero with no clips -10 rms and minus 12.8 integrated lufs so that's the actions let's look at the batch converter next the change log says support normalizing to target peak or loudness level when converting you can get to the batch converter from the file menu and in here just like the render window we've got this normalize option so let's take these two tom files here and i can normalize them to -24 minus six peak anything i want and uh yeah that works so next we're going to talk about metering there's a few new things for metering first we're going to talk about individual tracks and how we would do lufs measurements on individual tracks i'm going to go into the effects chain and there's a new plugin here we go to the js folder or the cocos folder and it's called loudness meter if we hit this question mark button we can see various options here for if it's true peaks rms momentary rms integrated lufs momentary we can turn any of these options on or off and we'll just add it to the display let's play this section [Music] we'll just pause there we've got true peak clips indicators and the peak level seems to be peaking at -6 we've got a a momentary loudness range here short term and i guess i should explain the differences between momentary short-term and integrated in case you don't know momentary is basically within a 300 millisecond window so i find this very good for uh dialogue making sure it's consistent between -23 and -14 that's where i put all my dialogue for videos and podcasts short term that's over a three second period what is the overall loudness within three second window integrated lufs integrated is over the entire content it is useful in smaller sections let's say comparing the loudness of the chorus of song a to song b you can just play through the chorus of each of those and then compare the numbers short term works well for that as well but has a different sort of averaging lra is the loudness range and that's kind of how much the loudness changes over time and so it seems that on the drums i'm getting about a minus 22 l ufs integrated number here in the 6.0 update they added the ability to embed plug-in uis into tracks so that works with this new loudest meter plug-in i'm going to right-click on it and show embedded ui in tcp and so when this plug-in is closed we can now see that loudness meter plug-in is within the track and so as we play this track back we can see this in real time [Music] and instead of having it in the track control panel we could also move it to the mixer control panel and so when this ui is closed it looks like this in the mixer so that's track metering and the new js effect now we're going to look at the master metering because this is all a little bit different now so on the master track here that i have showing by going to view menu and master track i've got an lufs meter here so i right click i get to see the options and for options we've got tcp meter loudness or peak peak was what it used to show up till this version the mixer meters we can show peak or loudness or either and the mixer top readout the number display we can have that showing peak or loudness we've got the multi-channel peak metering which is an older option obviously that's used for when you have more than two channels on a track and you want to see all the outputs on the meters rather than just the first two over-sampled peaks gives you kind of an estimate of what the peaks will be after rendering the project or after they've gone through a dta converter because sometimes it won't clip in the project it'll actually sound clipped when it's going through some analog gear and then for the loudness metering options we've got which type of loudness meter so we've got rms rms max we can have this on l2fsmax which will show the highest we'll kind of stop at the highest momentary loudness momentary with the integrated loudness showing short-term um short-term max and short-term with the loudness range so it's a little confusing but once you start to use it i think it'll make more sense and then there's the other options like the display offset which kind of just scales the meter it pushes the meter up higher um for some things that that makes it look better but it doesn't actually affect the numbers it just kind of makes the meters higher up in the display we're looking at the master track in the mixer uh same sort of options are there that window controls both of the options but we've got our loudness integrated we've got our peak levels here now instead of up to this update it was peak and rms and no one's really using rms anymore so it's great to see lufs metering right in the mixer in reaper now let's move on to effects some changes to effects jsfx plugins can now dynamically show and hide sliders via new slider show function so great example of where that's being used right now is inside this new loudness meter plugin so as you can see when you hit that question mark box it brings up all the parameters and if we just grab in any other js plug-in let's say general dynamics this one has all of these sliders always visible you can't get rid of them until they update the plugin so anyone that's creating jsfx plugins can now hide all the parameters that they don't want to show until the user wants them now with the retune plugin we can embed it into the track control panel so i'm going to grab the retune plug-in and just drop it on any random track here when i'm in the guitar tune review we can have this showing in the track so again right click show embedded ui and mcp or tcp so there's a little guitar tuner right on the track uh pretty cool to have that and then some more technical changes regarding effects support bridging or firewalling of vst-3 plug-ins and improve jsfx video processor and eel 2 rescript performance when running under rosetta 2 on m1 powered max i think both of these have a big effect mac users the vst3 may also affect windows user i haven't actually checked that but on my mac in the arm build of reaper between version 6.29 and 6.30 there is a big difference in the amount of vst 3 plugins that i was actually able to use there's still some that crash the izotope plug-ins still need to be updated to work on the m1 max at least within reaper running native arm code but there's things like the arturia plug-ins and all the t-racks plug-ins the devious machines plug-ins those can now be run as a bridged plug-in where it loads into a separate memory space and it actually it at least gets us using them it's not ideal because it's a separate floating window but it's better than not having them there at all and it gets us by until those companies are able to build native versions for all systems and when it comes to the js effects there's certain plugins like the sonic anomaly plugins comparing 6.29 to 6.30 there were certain plugins that were taking 4 cpu just a single instance and now they take zero so it's a huge improvement for the eel2 code based plug-ins and things i haven't had a chance to test that with the video processor but it should be really good and that's a great change for anyone using the intel builds on the m1 max let's quickly talk about super 8 changelog says allow controlling loop length synchronization mode via automatable parameters add per channel length division setting and when adding loops to project export linked channels as stereo file i'm still a total noob when it comes to super eight never been able to wrap my head around it still planning a video with someone that is an expert on this and uses it live and knows all these new features really well we're planning that for this week so i really hope that we're able to do that tutorial interview sort of thing coming up but i don't know for sure we're going to move on to miscellaneous features for consolidating they now support wildcards in the consolidated file name so if we go to file consolidate slash export tracks we now have a file name option here so we can use any of the wild cards we don't have to have the suffix consolidated on there anymore and just quickly let's compare that to what this window looks like in the slightly older version here there's no file name option in there on mac os improve appearance of fade menu items when using dark mode and this was something i think it came up in the uh fresh start part one video and um i think i reported the bug and some other people's reported the bug when you right click on the fade menu this used to be these these little icons here were like black on black and it was impossible to read them when you're in dark mode and now that's fixed so that's great to see render queue they've added a button to cancel all remaining renders so i'm going to open up the render queue and i'm going to start rendering these and in this pop-up we've got this new cancel all button which is awesome and when you cancel all you'll get this error three queued renders failed and remain in queue and so it's so common to like start rendering something and maybe see a peak or something like that or you just realize that you had some track muted something like that but it's great that you don't have to cancel each one you can just cancel the rest awesome and the last thing on the change log that i'm going to show you today is an option for video option to choose which monitor is used for full screen display this something that we've wanted for a really long time let's open up the video window if you right click in here you can choose which monitor you're going out to when you put this window in full screen does it go to the first display or the second display and um yeah that's awesome i always edit videos with a full screen video preview almost always i have to move the window to the other monitor then full screen it so that's great to see so that's it for what's new in reaper 6.30 hope you've enjoyed this video if you missed any of the previous videos in this series check the playlist link down below and catch up on all the changes to reaper please subscribe to the channel if you haven't already follow me on facebook and twitter support the reaper blog through patreon and visit reaperblog.net for a lot more tutorials [Applause] you

Channel: The REAPER Blog

Views: 22,556

Keywords: the reaper blog, reaperblog, reaper blog, reaper tutorial, jon tidey, cockos reaper, reaperdaw, reaper daw, reaper daw tutorial, reaper 6.30, reaper 6 update, reaper update, normalization, how to normalize in reaper, render normalization, LUFS metering in reaper

Id: TKbnNUNC4m8

Length: 21min 28sec (1288 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 06 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/wlmatl]

Nice set of features! Great summary, Jon.

[u/potato-truncheon]

Fantastic summary.

There was reference to a podcast series wherein all things LUFS are discussed.

https://themasteringshow.com/episode-44/ covers Loudness units 101. Listened this afternoon. It's excellent. (And Reaper now has proper loudness metering,!)

(Also wondering if a YouTube video on what to look for to set levels (short vs integrated) with a few contrasting dynamic song styles would be helpful for some?)

Thank you so much for your ongoing content!