Vu Meter App4/24/2021
In fact I like to keep this VU meter in my peripheral vision and work without looking directly at it.One, they hear loudness the same way our ears do, and two, they force you to put headroom in your mix.Headroom is so important it will take another whole article to tell you why you need it.
Now, VU means Volume Units and it was standardized in 1942 to use with telephone and radio broadcast equipment. Im sure you already know their warm glowing faces from all sorts of analog gear, and in the movies, and all over the place where people want to show a picture that says music in action. Thats great for preventing digital distortion, but it is not how our ears actually hear loudness. We dont react well to peak volume spikes because Ouch Peaks make us flinch. Our ears hear loudness by feeling the average sound level over time, and this is what VU meters show you. By the way, average level is often referred to as RMS. Youll see that on the Ableton compressors and lots of other places. ![]() Why do you need them both Because they do two different things. This is really important because digital audio has a hard limit and beyond that you get a particularly awful type of distortion. Peak meters are simple to use, just keep the meter in the green and bring down the volume if it turns red. VU meters (RMS) show you how loud a sound feels in real life. You need them to compare how much space a sound takes in the mix. Use RMS, or VU meters, to compare two sounds to each other and get a realistic picture of how loud they are. A peak meter doesnt do this very well.) For example If you have a bassline that peaks at -5dB, and a drum loop that also peaks at -5dB, it does not mean they will sound balanced next to each other. Drums are a sound that peaks with very short, loud transient spikes far higher than the actual loudness of the whole kit -- but a bassline has low, fat transients that peak very close to its average level. End result, a bassline will sound way louder than drums when you measure them with a Peak meter. But if you set both your bassline and drum loop to -5db using RMS VU meters, they will sound balanced to the ear. VU meters react more slowly, like our ears, which gives you a realistic picture of the loudness that a sound is pushing. You cant really use Peak meters to compare the loudness of two sounds as they appear to our sense of hearing. So why do I need a plugin for this You need a VU meter plugin because the Ableton meters dont show RMS VU level very clearly. In Live, the light-green bars on top show Peak, and the dark green bars in the middle show RMS. I love it that Ableton added this function, but its still not easy to read numbers for the average level. If you want to see the numbers, you need to expand the tracks horizontally. It gives you a big fat screen that you can park anywhere you want, and a needle that you can see without counting little lines.
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