Hit Record Meter (0.1.8)

github.com/air...
Here's what's new in version 0.1.8! Meter now focuses entirely on peaks (RMS is used for some internal calculations and the size of the dots in the Zero Cross section).
Each section is labeled: Peak Loudness, Slew Brightness, Zero Cross Bass. They all show red, blue and green dots. It's always the same data, just arranged differently, like this…
Peak Loudness shows the dots on a dB meter (labelling the horizonal lines as -6, -12, -18, -24, and -30 dB). This is the same as a normal RMS meter, except it's only showing peaks: if they are not showing up at the bottom of the meter, the RMS loudness is too loud to let them go down there.
Slew Brightness arranges the dots by slew factor, so brighter ones will be higher (as a rule).
Zero Cross tracks how long the audio could go before crossing zero, so this is not only presence of low bass, it's also about whether there are higher frequencies to interfere with that bass. It's also labelled now, at 200 hz, 40 hz and 20 hz (which is the bottom of the meter). Again, it tracks not just whether bass exists, but whether it's allowed to dominate. If you notice, there are lines higher than 200hz around where the 'Zero Cross' label is: those lines are 2k and 20k, and most audio shouldn't even get near there for zero crossings. Refer to music you like as a reference for how this ought to look.
There's a line of text now that tells you about three things: the original Loudness measurement (which isn't RMS, it's the raw density of how many peaks are present), a new measurement for novelty (how much the pattern of peaks changes, making a different sound), and a measurement of how many bright, loud, and dark peaks happened. Dark peaks aren't always bass, they're just peaks where the slew isn't high enough, just as bright peaks are all slew and treble. Meter now keeps track of this to tell you if you're over-bright or over-dark.
And there's a rating, like there was before. But now it's not 'peak loudness'. Now it's novelty MINUS peak loudness and MINUS how off-balance the bright/dark peaks are. The idea was to track down roughly how striking the sounds were, even though Meter doesn't know what a note is or understand music per se. Turns out, this new Meter is very good at singling out breakthrough songs that broke a big act (for instance, its favorite Led Zeppelin track is Good Times Bad Times) and career-making records like Sergeant Pepper. It likes punchy, dynamic music like the B-52s and the Beastie Boys and Chic. Its favorite Aerosmith track seems to be Walk This Way, and it's sorted the Yes tracks I've so far recorded, into a list that is almost exactly sorted by record sales.
If you think that's interesting and want to mix stuff to make Airwindows Meter happy, the results you get will probably sound good once you're done. I can't make it give you Top Ten hits, that stuff was back when we had a record industry. But it can help you get striking and exciting sounds. You can also use it to match other music you know: study the meters and make your music match what you see on your target music and that should help. But to pursue hits as Meter understands them, allow for a bunch of headroom and then use up ALL that space with peak energy. It likes things a little dry, not loads of reverb, and it likes it when the arrangement leaves spaces: if possible, space like the song is breathing in tempo with the desired music. Definitely pay attention to whether bright/dark is out of balance, but you can either go for the hi-fi sound of bright/dark peaks, or you can just try to make all the sounds peak out as loudly as possible, which means mixing everything to be loud and sonorous. Both work.
There's more tools coming for working with all this, but this is a good update for being able to keep track of what you're doing with all those plugins. If Meter breaks or fails to work for you, I'll try to get help as to fixing it: I'm out over my skis working with JUCE but with the help of the Pamplejuce framework, I can try to provide GUI plugins. Have fun!

[@ShaneTucker-s2v]

This is it Chris. An artist's dream tool ; make music, mix to our taste, put through meter, adjust to meter's taste, DONE. No more unfinished projects due to obsessing over technical details. You've unlocked my chronic paralysis. My continued patronage has never been nor will ever be enough thanks. I think once ConsoleX drops, my head will explode.

[@airwindows]

With a bit of luck when ConsoleX drops you guys will start making tons of music, while I'm still too busy on plugins to be able to XD

[@Sockeater]

This meter has changed my understanding of dynamics and mixing! It's like going from 2d to 3d. Thank You for this!

[@scarfypedia]

your thoughts on music and production are both refreshing and inspiring

[@JELmusic]

Thank you Chris! This version is very good and very informative. Since working with METER I have found that music sounds less tiring/fatiguing when guided by METER, and that it significantly helps with performing good mix/master decisions that simply aren't possible by using ones ears alone (I'm sure we all know that we hear music differently after long mix/master periods, where METER stays neutral and un-biased all the time) And to me that makes METER a must-have tool going forward! The blue, red and green color-display is well-balanced and much easier to discern than the black and blue in version1.4, so a brilliant update. Also the info-text lines on the display are a welcome addition. I warmly recommend anybody still doubting the use of METER, to take time out to learn this tool, as I'm sure it will improve the sound of their music (Perhaps especially those who think they have nothing more to learn about mastering music, because there is always more to learn)

[@TheAzurefang]

AirWindows continuing to make the VST industry obsolete! I love it. Not going to lie I don't fully understand what actions should be taken based on the data observed in Hit Meter. Further tutorials and demonstrations would be amazing

[@geoffallan3804]

I've been using 0.1.7 in an attempt to get better mixes, but I can see that this version is clearer and you've explained what's going on really well. Over the last few weeks I've been able to get some really good results, I'm hoping to revisit those mixes in the next day or two and get them even better. Thank you for this!

[@criddyla696]

Great plugin and brilliant track, fine indeed Chris. Thank you for making the only plugins I use pretty much.

[@Pummelfay]

Really interesting! this really is a unique idea hope you refine it even further

[@flarkmusic]

Well, this is now on my master track! Highly understandable, great stuff and background! Thanks a lot!

[@paulgilbody]

This is inspired - thank you for all the value you give

[@YourFavouriteColor]

this is very cool and interesting. I'm having a hard time understanding, on a conceptual level, "slew." I looked up that it has to do with amplified signals not being able to adapt quickly enough to correctly re-create fast high frequencies? I'm probably saying that wrong. Also, I'm not sure what a green dot means. ie something that isn't a low end instrument, that is very loud, but not enough slew. I'm picturing like, a snare drum that's too muffled? Or is it more complicated than that? Thanks for your advice!

[@zzzfoodmatt]

I have to say I love your plugin - keep up the great work

[@jackveranda]

My friend you should sell this to a big company or if you could make the GUI really nice you could sell it.. I'd buy it. Well done on this one. 👏

[@PabloFernandez-bv1bv]

Wow Chris, you think way outside the box and do things nobody is doing. It gives a great insight of what's going on a mix. I've been feeding my own mixes to Meter, I think it loves loud peaks, even when most of the cloud is blue, it rates high. But if I try to balance or at least add more green and red dots to a mix, it sounds better to me regardless of rating.

[@airwindows]

Like I said, you can go all 'loud peaks' (the blue dots) but you can also balance it with some red and green and Meter will show you where they went, if the bright stuff is over-strident etc. :) Your ear and musical intent must be your guide. At least when people try to force 'good results' out of this meter, they'll dial back the clipping and limiting…

[@N8oRMusic]

pretty cool. Definitely gonna use this to see how shit my mixes really are

[@carlosog5041]

Thank you very much Chris 🙏🙏🙏

[@funkydrops]

@reaperiani told me you're a genius: Francesco's right

[@djw457]

I find on my Laptop, that I can't see the entire UI, mainly the bottom row, I hope a future update will allow for scaling in the 'Y'. My question is, during a mix, should I monitor each Bus to try to get things in the blue, and I would use EQ mostly for this? Just want to understand the process during mixing. Is it mainly an EQ work-flow to get things into the hit zone?

[@eiknxdux8261]

Interesting update! Could you please bring back RMS in the next update, it was very useful👌

[@lucasturney4269]

See: 2:48+

[@lastwarning1]

Hi Chris, great work as usual. After playing around with Meter for a while, I’d like to report some things: It seems that if a track starts off with a drum roll or filtered sequence, the final score jumps to CF immediately. I’ve noticed this several times. Also, Daft Punk’s “Phoenix” gets a final score of AB, which doesn’t seem right to me. Apologies if you’ve mentioned something pertaining to these concerns in the video, I have yet to watch it (I will). Thanks again

[@before.23]

Yeah this happened to me with a track that began with noise. Maybe it’s a reaction to the high frequencies?

[@before.23]

Still also concentrate on novelty, maybe your track is a cf in an instant but if novelty stays at F that may be a bad sign and means your track is too static.

[@airwindows]

I've observed that as well but haven't worked out what's causing it. The 'adjust for imbalance between bright and dark' is a _subtraction_ so it shouldn't be doing that. I would say, don't do what I'm doing and try to rank a 1000+ song collection to see what it does, in case I sort out the 'bump to CF for no good reason' quirk :) Or you could do it anyway because it's always been like this: Meter is a moving target, it's just not usually changing with constant updates. In particular, the ranking will bug out. Considering what it's doing, can you blame it for freaking out? :)

[@rosegold-beats]

I've been reading the captions above and You know what i notice about 90's hip hop and todays music is that the bass sounds way more full and resonate better with the speakers. The music of today can hit hard but is not as clean.

[@gaymanisfree]

this is just patently false

[@rosegold-beats]

@@gaymanisfreeits very hard for me to explain. You really have to notice it yourself.

[@joost3783]

First of all - this is really interesting, unique and useful. Finally a meter that goes deeper into peaks than crest factor. I do have some (I think) very constructive feedback. It would be great if you could bring back the RMS graph (maybe with lower opacity to not distract too hard from the main objective which is looking at the peak loudness etc.), but the RMS graph does give an approximate overview of the crest factor (which would also be a useful readout somewhere, maybe the average crest factor over the time period measured?). Also a more minute thing is that if you work on loud material, the readouts often get masked by the dots, so it would be great if text of the plugin could be "above" the readout values.

[@airwindows]

I mean, fair, but crest factor no longer matters. Only what the peaks are doing matters… to this kind of music analysis. I guarantee I can't do 'rank by sales' off RMS or even direct peak loudness like the previous, but I've now thrown all my Led Zeppelin, ZZ Top and Elton John tracks into the same sort of thing and had similar results. Particularly with Elton John where it flagged Honky Cat, Bennie and the Jets, Saturday Night's All Right For Fighting and Rocket Man as the big hits, and was basically 100% right. Crest factor no longer matters, it's what the peaks are doing (not how much space they are in, or how much silence above RMS).

[@gameboyz7497]

ty very much chris !

[@mixourband]

Thanks for the update Chris is there sone where I could download your test results for future referencing? Thanks again.

[@idespisegravity]

That red and green look EXACTLY the same to me 😂 I can usually tell the difference when there's a limited set of colors just by process of elimination, but man, you picked the two shades that are apparently indistinguishable to my broken colorblind eyes, hahahah

[@airwindows]

One thing about it is, if you look at the middle meter the ones on top are nearly always red and the ones on the bottom are nearly always green. And the text gives percentages. But really it's not even always one color: both are also shades, so it gets very tricky to make visual sense of it even with all colors being functional :)

[@FotisandStuff]

Funny how you mentioned Beastie Boys, and then called one of your upcoming reverbs "Intergalactic" ;)

[@lostcrow]

Do you have a "Cleanse the music industry of corruption" meter please? we all need one of those

[@Ezrecordings]

🤣😂 Real talk, how true!

[@before.23]

It has always been like that.

[@yasunakaikumi]

I wonder if you can do instead a heat graph, I feel like making it like a heat graph is more easier to read where sound are saturated, especially the low end (dark)

[@davidasher22]

How can a CD sound ‘tinny? It’s always been the same lossless format right? What am I missing? Was it because the tech was new and there were manufacturing errors? Possibly we weren’t hearing the usual saturation of an analog medium? I know there was a transition period where even the mixing and mastering engineers were struggling to get their music to translate but it wasn’t the actual CD right?

[@TK-yu2pv]

Not the CD itself, but inferior quality Analog to Digital and Digital to Analog converters back then that had higher distortion and less dynamic headroom than today's converters.

[@airwindows]

There are inherent problems with using only 16bits and rolling off as low as 22k with a brickwall. This can be worked around: I've written lots of dithers that can do 16 bits acceptably, and you can mix dark to stay away from the brickwall zone. Unfortunately this is right around when mainstream pop mixing was pushing the brightness hardest.

[@genuinefreewilly5706]

Heck I am happy with Galactic 1. Are these applications in the latest version of Airwindows consolidated? tnx again

[@KOSMIKFEADRECORDS]

Please add a high pass or am eq (maybe in the feedback loop) to galactic3!

[@zt-handle]

how would you summarize this for someone whose colorblind?

[@airwindows]

I'm gonna have to come up with something for someone who's red/green colorblind, but I do have the text in there indicating in words and numbers whether the bright or dark is too much :)

[@cue4165]

Ich mag das!

[@KOSMIKFEADRECORDS]

Wow. I think the snares soind a bit better in the to tape version.

[@airwindows]

You can see on Meter how it's evening out the peak distribution. No ToTape, the peaks spike up farther. With it, we're softly clipping the drums a little on those peaks, and also on the 2-buss (each instrument got its own custom ToTape and then the buss also got one after summing in Console9)

[@tiborvegh700]

Yes on the original version the snares sound very disconnected and too loud, but on the tape version it sounds absolutely great!

[@timbranniganmusic3458]

This looks like a great tool for mixing and mastering. I’m assuming it’s not compatible with my Mac?

[@airwindows]

Beats me. It's a modern build and I'm not able to do retro builds for this one, but I would say try it and see. My hands are tied with the JUCE stuff as I'm just building on the framework. It depends on what runs AU or CLAP or VST3: I should try and see if it runs the VST3 on my old Snow Leopard dev laptop :)

[@timbranniganmusic3458]

Thank you for the reply, I appreciate it. I think it’s a genius way to work with audio. Can’t wait to try it.

[@KOSMIKFEADRECORDS]

Hehehe... don't get it twisted. That song is vool even without blue dots!

[@airwindows]

You can do the blue dots (interestingly, Genesis 'Wind and Wuthering' is ALL BLUE DOT) or you can balance the red and green dots, that's just as good and more 'hi-fi' :)

[@FotisandStuff]

Hey, welcome back, KosmikFead!

[@CountJayeAndTheHardBeats]

I keep listening but have to admit, I don't understand anything you're saying.

[@DarkTrapStudio]

Listening to Chris like shifting dimension, you got to get used to it to understand it may take a bit of time then youll come back 6 month later and it will click