Utility for measuring average decibels across a collection of sound files?

[Ian McCall]

Hi - I originally posted this in uk.comp.sys.mac and was recommended to
try here as well.

Does anyone know if there's a utility to get average decibels from an
audio track, where 'an audio track' could mean wav, aif, mp3, or mp4
(as in I'd convert to whatever's necessary)?

Context: am trying to prepare a number of different music tracks to be
at the same level. It's my music so I have control over settings etc.,
but I've now listened to these so many times that I'm finding it hard
to be independent and quantitative about the situation.

What would be ideal would be a utility that could scan and do
min/max/avg. Icing on cake would be if it could also do histograms
(i.e. "of your five minute track, 90% is spent at this decibel range
with 5% being significantly more quiet and 5% being significantly more
loud). For cherries on top of the icing, it would be able to aggregate
these readings across multiple sound files (i.e. feed in the whole
album, eliminating the manual step of me trying to correlate the
results).

Any ideas?


Cheers,
Ian

[Ian McCall]

On 2016-03-05 16:56:15 +0000, Ian McCall > said:

> Hi - I originally posted this in uk.comp.sys.mac and was recommended to
> try here as well.
>
> Does anyone know if there's a utility to get average decibels from an
> audio track, where 'an audio track' could mean wav, aif, mp3, or mp4
> (as in I'd convert to whatever's necessary)?

I should add that I don't really care which operating system - anything
that works. Mac, Windows, Linux, anything that can be run in a virtual
machine - doesn't matter. Need the result.



Cheers,
Ian

[Dave Plowman (News)]

In article >,
Ian McCall > wrote:
> Hi - I originally posted this in uk.comp.sys.mac and was recommended to
> try here as well.

> Does anyone know if there's a utility to get average decibels from an
> audio track, where 'an audio track' could mean wav, aif, mp3, or mp4
> (as in I'd convert to whatever's necessary)?

> Context: am trying to prepare a number of different music tracks to be
> at the same level. It's my music so I have control over settings etc.,
> but I've now listened to these so many times that I'm finding it hard
> to be independent and quantitative about the situation.

> What would be ideal would be a utility that could scan and do
> min/max/avg. Icing on cake would be if it could also do histograms
> (i.e. "of your five minute track, 90% is spent at this decibel range
> with 5% being significantly more quiet and 5% being significantly more
> loud). For cherries on top of the icing, it would be able to aggregate
> these readings across multiple sound files (i.e. feed in the whole
> album, eliminating the manual step of me trying to correlate the
> results).

A meter to measure accuratly subjective average audio levels is the holy
grail. The broadcast lot claim to now have one - although you could have
fooled me, listening to much of TV.

However, it also depends on the type of music. If it has a wide dynamic
range, are you going to compress that? If not, it might be just levels
between tracks that stand out. And of course if a really heavy rock track
is followed by a ballad, levels alone won't smooth that out.

I'm afraid the best way to do things like this is by ear. ;-)

--
*Reality is a crutch for people who can't handle drugs.

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

[Don Pearce[_3_]]

On Sat, 5 Mar 2016 16:56:15 +0000, Ian McCall > wrote:

>Hi - I originally posted this in uk.comp.sys.mac and was recommended to
>try here as well.
>
>Does anyone know if there's a utility to get average decibels from an
>audio track, where 'an audio track' could mean wav, aif, mp3, or mp4
>(as in I'd convert to whatever's necessary)?
>
>Context: am trying to prepare a number of different music tracks to be
>at the same level. It's my music so I have control over settings etc.,
>but I've now listened to these so many times that I'm finding it hard
>to be independent and quantitative about the situation.
>
>What would be ideal would be a utility that could scan and do
>min/max/avg. Icing on cake would be if it could also do histograms
>(i.e. "of your five minute track, 90% is spent at this decibel range
>with 5% being significantly more quiet and 5% being significantly more
>loud). For cherries on top of the icing, it would be able to aggregate
>these readings across multiple sound files (i.e. feed in the whole
>album, eliminating the manual step of me trying to correlate the
>results).
>
>Any ideas?
>
>
>Cheers,
>Ian

Orban, the sound processor people used by just about every radio
station have a desktop sound meter for PC or MAC. One of its meters is
a pretty good perceived loudness meter. Give that a go, and you may
find it tells you what you need to know, even if you then have to make
the changes yourself.

http://www.orban.com/meter/

And it is free.

d

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[Ian McCall]

On 2016-03-05 18:00:23 +0000, (Don Pearce) said:


> Orban, the sound processor people used by just about every radio
> station have a desktop sound meter for PC or MAC. One of its meters is
> a pretty good perceived loudness meter. Give that a go, and you may
> find it tells you what you need to know, even if you then have to make
> the changes yourself.
>
> http://www.orban.com/meter/
>
> And it is free.

Excellent - thanks for that. Will give it a shot.


Cheers,
Ian

[Dave Plowman (News)]

In article >,
Don Pearce > wrote:
> Orban, the sound processor people used by just about every radio
> station have a desktop sound meter for PC or MAC. One of its meters is
> a pretty good perceived loudness meter. Give that a go, and you may
> find it tells you what you need to know, even if you then have to make
> the changes yourself.

But does that meter look at the entire track before giving a reading? That
appears to be a requirement.

As regards giving an indication of loudness at any one point in time, the
good ol' PPM takes some beating - provided you know how to read it.

--
*The problem with the gene pool is that there is no lifeguard *

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

[Don Pearce[_3_]]

On Sat, 05 Mar 2016 23:50:49 +0000 (GMT), "Dave Plowman (News)"
> wrote:

>In article >,
> Don Pearce > wrote:
>> Orban, the sound processor people used by just about every radio
>> station have a desktop sound meter for PC or MAC. One of its meters is
>> a pretty good perceived loudness meter. Give that a go, and you may
>> find it tells you what you need to know, even if you then have to make
>> the changes yourself.
>
>But does that meter look at the entire track before giving a reading? That
>appears to be a requirement.
>
>As regards giving an indication of loudness at any one point in time, the
>good ol' PPM takes some beating - provided you know how to read it.

No it is more like a PPM dynamic. Several DAW programmes will give an
average level reading for an entire piece, but this doesn't work. I
have tried adjusting two tracks to the exact same average level, and
they still sound completely different in volume. Perceived loudness is
clearly about much more than where the meter needles go.

d

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[Jim Lesurf[_2_]]

In article >, Ian McCall >
wrote:

> Does anyone know if there's a utility to get average decibels from an
> audio track, where 'an audio track' could mean wav, aif, mp3, or mp4
> (as in I'd convert to whatever's necessary)?

> Context: am trying to prepare a number of different music tracks to be
> at the same level. It's my music so I have control over settings etc.,
> but I've now listened to these so many times that I'm finding it hard
> to be independent and quantitative about the situation.

The key snag here at present is if you're wanting the 'percieved loudness'
rather than a simply average or peak signal power.

There are lots of programs that'll give you the peak/ave/etc powers. e.g.
'sox' will do this via its 'stats' option, and is available on pretty much
all platforms for free. I've also written programs to do stats on wave
files with a 100ms resolution.

The snag is that loudness is very different. And in practice you may find
that even using a program that follows the recent standards agreements for
it doesn't suit you if your replay system (inc. room!) has, say, an unflat
frequency response, altering the weighting in that way.

Jim

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[Brian Gaff]

Most of the so called normalising that at least windows has are far from
ideal. assuming they try to preserve the original dynamic range, the tracks
with lower dynamic rang seem to be quiet. I know one can squash the dynamic
range of the tracks to all sound as ghastly as one another as radio
stations do this all the time!

Brian

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"Ian McCall" > wrote in message
...
> Hi - I originally posted this in uk.comp.sys.mac and was recommended to
> try here as well.
>
> Does anyone know if there's a utility to get average decibels from an
> audio track, where 'an audio track' could mean wav, aif, mp3, or mp4 (as
> in I'd convert to whatever's necessary)?
>
> Context: am trying to prepare a number of different music tracks to be at
> the same level. It's my music so I have control over settings etc., but
> I've now listened to these so many times that I'm finding it hard to be
> independent and quantitative about the situation.
>
> What would be ideal would be a utility that could scan and do min/max/avg.
> Icing on cake would be if it could also do histograms (i.e. "of your five
> minute track, 90% is spent at this decibel range with 5% being
> significantly more quiet and 5% being significantly more loud). For
> cherries on top of the icing, it would be able to aggregate these readings
> across multiple sound files (i.e. feed in the whole album, eliminating the
> manual step of me trying to correlate the results).
>
> Any ideas?
>
>
> Cheers,
> Ian
>

[Dave Plowman (News)]

In article >,
Don Pearce > wrote:
> >But does that meter look at the entire track before giving a reading? That
> >appears to be a requirement.
> >
> >As regards giving an indication of loudness at any one point in time, the
> >good ol' PPM takes some beating - provided you know how to read it.

> No it is more like a PPM dynamic. Several DAW programmes will give an
> average level reading for an entire piece, but this doesn't work. I
> have tried adjusting two tracks to the exact same average level, and
> they still sound completely different in volume. Perceived loudness is
> clearly about much more than where the meter needles go.

Absolutely. A trained ear can make a very good guess at average levels in
conjunction with a good PPM and a knowledge of the type of material.

But the suits are willing to pay anything for a machine to do this. I've
seen it claimed it now exists and is in use. I'd only be convinced by
using one in anger - and that's not going to happen now. Certainly there's
no evidence of it being in use.

--
*If at first you don't succeed, then skydiving definitely isn't for you *

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

[Ian McCall]

On 2016-03-07 00:46:05 +0000, "Dave Plowman (News)"
> said:

> IBut the suits are willing to pay anything for a machine to do this. I've
> seen it claimed it now exists and is in use. I'd only be convinced by
> using one in anger - and that's not going to happen now. Certainly there's
> no evidence of it being in use.

Have a look t things like landr.com. Now, as far as I can tell, not a
single mastering engineer's job is threatened by this. It's a damn good
drafting tool though, and for my simple tracks with not too many
instruments in them it has done a really good job. For my complex ones
it has done a decent approximation and I'm definitely going to both
listen to it and also look at it (look at the waveform). It's unlikely
to be the final say however.


Cheers,
Ian

[Ian McCall]

On 2016-03-05 23:50:49 +0000, "Dave Plowman (News)"
> said:

> In article >,
> Don Pearce > wrote:
>> Orban, the sound processor people used by just about every radio
>> station have a desktop sound meter for PC or MAC. One of its meters is
>> a pretty good perceived loudness meter. Give that a go, and you may
>> find it tells you what you need to know, even if you then have to make
>> the changes yourself.
>
> But does that meter look at the entire track before giving a reading? That
> appears to be a requirement.


Yes, that's definitely the requirement. I use Logic Pro X which has a
ton of decent sound metering tools for real time, but it's the offline
analysis that I'm looking for.

I won't be slavishly following exact normalisation, but it would be
really helpful to know if I was way off base. Ideally I'd just use ears
of course, but as I say I've heard these things too many times to be
objective now.


Cheers,
Ian

[Dave Plowman (News)]

In article >,
Ian McCall > wrote:
> On 2016-03-07 00:46:05 +0000, "Dave Plowman (News)"
> > said:

> > IBut the suits are willing to pay anything for a machine to do this.
> > I've seen it claimed it now exists and is in use. I'd only be
> > convinced by using one in anger - and that's not going to happen now.
> > Certainly there's no evidence of it being in use.

> Have a look t things like landr.com. Now, as far as I can tell, not a
> single mastering engineer's job is threatened by this. It's a damn good
> drafting tool though, and for my simple tracks with not too many
> instruments in them it has done a really good job. For my complex ones
> it has done a decent approximation and I'm definitely going to both
> listen to it and also look at it (look at the waveform). It's unlikely
> to be the final say however.

At the end of the day, a mastering engineer - if say mastering a CD - will
make sure it sounds ok by listening to the entire thing. That's what he's
paid to do.

This would be far too costly for say a radio station, so they rely on
automatic equipment. And you sure as anything can hear it working.

Main problem is TV sound. The public complain about ads or trails being
too loud. Inaudible dialogue on drama - Jamaica Inn. Happy Valley, etc.

The solutions to all this have been long known. But very costly to
implement. So the suits will pay anything for a loudness meter that says
everything is OK. Even when it patently isn't.

--
*Forget about World Peace...Visualize using your turn signal.

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.