I recently received a mail from Steinberg with a link to a free (vst windows) metering plugin for r128 measurement.
A group of sound engineers from the EBU is fighting the loudness in war in broadcast and it seems that at least in Germany/Switzerland/Austria they might have won some important battles and broadcaters will move away from equal peak level to equal average loudness, thus eliminating the need for the consumer to constantly use the remote control to adjust the volume settings for the TV set when the commercials start and enabling sound techs to level according to the ear and use some dynamics in the mix when needed.
I found a couple of really interesting links about the topic on the net. The EBU has webinars that explain the concept:
I also found a link to a vst plugin that has a graphical implementation and is surround and mac compatible. It costs only 10 Euros.
Hopefully Steinberg will implement (at least) file based support to this new EBU standard soon. There are already open source solutions on the net for this, but they are very inconvenient to handle for the end user.
I also strongly feel that Steinberg should improve the metering options in Nuendo.
EBU will enforce R128 for all their members on short notice, if i am not mistaking next year already.
In addition to that, they try to make it into a law in each country, so that the commercial stations also have to respect the EBU R128 rules. If memory serves well, there are a few countries where this law already passed and has been approved, Italy being one of them.
However, for us -Post People- it is not as good as we might think. It still leaves the door open for all those who spit out audio from their FCP or AVID. No special skills are needed to mix according EBU R128. There are freeware tools available that measure your program material (over the full length) and then lower the global level so it matches R128.
It goes without saying that program material which is carefully mixed against the R128 guidelines will sound better and louder than a final mix which is normalized to match R128, but as we all know … who cares …
There are a number of hardware and software meters available with the R128 standard build in.
PPMulator will come with an upgrade of their excellent meters, there is the Dolby Media meter (which also has the Dolby speech recognition/the software version of the LM100), and many more.
There is a detailed and excellent paper available from EBU: the EBU-TECH 3343.
It should be available from the EBU website.
I’m a beta tester for the upcoming zplane PPmulator plugin. It’s loudness metering is excellent and I’m using it daily.
I think there will be a surge in R128 metering by lots of plug-in developers. I"m actually using a combination of the audiopluggers kmeter for average apparent volume metering and the zpane PPmulator beta. Although I’m finding that I’m starting to rely mostly on the PPmulator beta as its latest builds are really stable and I’m adjusting to using it as my primary meter.
I still only have PPMulator Plus v2.
Cannot register it, it seems, as all points to Zplane site & it wants a serial number I do not have.
Tried to register for forums, and got a 404 error when activating in the email link too.
Basically, am I up to date on my version, does anyone know?
Neil,
My V2 of PPmulator Plus is 2.11.3 and I’m pretty sure thats the latest one for V2.
If you are having any license issues try contacting Zplane for support. Prior to helping the V3 beta I emailed them a few times to get licensing or other issues resolved and they were prompt in their responses.
Thanks guys - I did get in contact, and am all sorted out now.
Looking forward to the new version, which I will buy on day 1 - great tool.
Should be a deal done between Steinberg & ZPlane and get this in as standard.