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

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

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.

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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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

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.

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

---
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
https://www.avast.com/antivirus

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

--
Please use the address on the audiomisc page if you wish to email me.
Electronics http://www.st-and.ac.uk/~www_pa/Scot...o/electron.htm
Armstrong Audio http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/Armstrong/armstrong.html
Audio Misc http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/index.html

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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Blind user, so no pictures please!
"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

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.