Meters.lv2 plugins released to provide advanced audio level meters

by Alexandre Prokoudine
Filed under: Audio,
LV2 / audio plugins

Robin Gareus announced the first public version of meters.lv2 — a bundle of LV2 plugins for audio level meering and advanced sound analysis. And we are giving away a book to help you learn using them.

Meters.lv2 features 10 basic needle style meters — DIN, Nordic, EBU, BBC, and VU — both mono and stereo variants. You are probably already familiar with their vertical versions that are part of Ardour since v3.3.

DIN meter in meters.lv2

But the bundle also incudes several plug-ins for more sophisticated analysis. First of all, it’s an EBU R128 meter. The standard is quite new (2010) and introduces two new terms: loudness range and maximum true peak level (see PDF for complete reference):

  • Loudness Range (LRA): the distribution of loudness within a programme;
  • Maximum True Peak Level: the maximum value of the audio signal waveform of a programme in the continuous time domain.

Hence this user interface:

EBU R128 in meters.lv2

There’s also a stereo phase scope:

Stereo phase scope in meters.lv2

And a 31-band spectrum analyzer:

Spectrum analyzer in meters.lv2

There are a few more meters in the bundle: a stereo phase correlation meter and a digital true-peak meter (4x oversampling).

If you want to learn using audio level meters properly, there’s a great book — “Audio Metering. Measurements, Standards, Practice” book by Eddy Brixen. We are giving away one hard copy of it.

Post in comments below, what combination of DAW and audio interface you have, and we’ll randomly pick a winner on Sunday. Submissions close on October 13, 5pm UTC.

You can grab meters.lv2 source code on GitHub. Binary builds expected to hit repositories for Linux distributions soon enough.