Loudness Display in Wavelab Pro

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Loudness Display in Wavelab Pro

hello everybody Andrew Blake from thedigitalaudiomanual.com today let's talkabout the loudness display in wavelabPro but before we start I want to remindyou that there's a link below to thefree content navigation guide which isan easy to navigate webpage with linksto all the content on this channel andbesides that in the near future I'mgoing to begin adding tips and otherbits of information that will only beavailable there you know things likesimple steps that will get you startedand up and running quick things that arein the videos but are written down insimple steps that serve as quickreminders when you need information downthe road if you're working with programslike wave lab or Cubase plugins or thecable guys shaper box and many manyother projects that are in the worksthen I know you're going to find justlike I have that this is an invaluablestudy Aid and the other thing I want tomake sure you understand is that this isnot a simple PDF this is a constantlyupdated page that has any informationthat is new or anytime videos arechanged really any anything updated andonce you have it you will always havethe latest information constantlyupdated so if you haven't gotten italready go to the link below click on itand save it to your favorites it's mygift to you and it's absolutely freeOkay so let's get started so there'svarious places in wavelab that displaythe loudness you have a loudness meterup on top you have various plugins andthe various effect slots but if you goto the Wave window which is where youwould do any kind of audio editingdirectly on a wave on the bottom youhave these little tabs one is thewaveform one says spectrogram one sayswavelet and the last one of the bunchsays the loudness so obviously we havevarious curves and different colors oflines here what does all this mean ifyou look above you can see the wholesong of what I have here the whole waveof my song and below it this graph iskind of representing the variousdifferent things to analyze loudnesswise as the song progresses frombeginning to end going from left toright and each one of these curves oreach one of these colors kind ofrepresents different data on theloudness and we're gonna look into thosebut the first concept to kind ofunderstand when you look at this and togive you some perspective of the morePeaks and valleys you have the more thisis kind of representing differentDynamic change over time basically whensomething is getting louder or softerand when you see lines that are straightand consistent pretty much across theyare also representing straight or fairlyconsistent loudness across the song inthe case of my song on some of thesethings that's exactly what I want I wantthe overall kind of to be fairlyconsistent so the song's notdisappearing Into the Fire distance andthen coming back too loud at some pointon the other hand I don't want it to bejust a completely straight line oneverything which has no life of any kindso there's definitely various things youwant to look for and understand whenyou're looking at this graphall right so let's try to make somesense out of this what we're seeing hereright now there is a whole bunch ofCurves all being displayed at one timebut let's break this down a little bitand see what some of the details tell usif we go down to our tab which saysloudness right next to it we have anedit settings we hit that and we'regiven this screen which if you look downwe have a whole bunch of presets rightaway we can look at and if you gothrough these presets it gives youvarious views every time you change ityou'll want to hit apply to actually seethose different views here's one thatshows just true Peaks only I hit applyand there's also one here that saysdefault and that brings back all thosedifferent waves at once as you'relooking at the screen it has check boxesand these check boxes allow you to turndifferent areas on and off for examplethe momentary loudness or the integratedloudnessyou can go down and turn the short-termloudness on or off you can turn theloudness range on or off let me give anexample that I think is prettyIlluminating to check out we're going toturn everything off I'm going to hit allthese check marks the loudness rangeeverything the only one I want to leaveon is the one that says short-termloudness and one that says show therange and I'm going to tell you whatthose mean let me hit the apply Buttonas you can see it left one lane downhere or one wave and this is theshort-term loudness which you can seegoes various ways and kind of Rises andfalls in different areas here two thingsthat are valuable to look at here whenyou're looking at this number one youhave these lines going across from leftto right these are these access lineswhich again you can check or uncheck andyou have an option for three of them anupper a reference and a lower now againthey've set them up with their defaultsbut it's much more valuable if you pickyour own defaults for example if I takemy upper range and I say I want to knowwhere minus 10 is and then I hit applyit now draws the line right here at -10so I can see where my short termloudness is compared to a minus 10 of anupper range here let's say I go to myreference and I set that to typicallylike a Spotify or YouTube-14 then I hit apply now I have thatline going across right here and I cansee where my again short-term loudnessis much lower than even that maybe I'llgo to my lower and I'm going to set thatat like negative 18. so I just spin mymouse till I see that hit apply and nowI have a very graphic representation ofmy short-term loudness below the minus18 below the minus 14 and below theminus 10. now this is a track I haven'tmastered yet and that's why it's so lowin loudness but this gives you a greatvisual representation of where you standat every point in the song as it goesalong here now the other thing thatwe're seeing besides the wave notice howit has kind of a thick Shadow to it if Igo up to this option that says show therange and I uncheck that and then hitapply now we see just this single wavewell what is that shadow let me turn itback on again hit apply this is actuallyshowing the dynamic range as it movesthrough this song The Shadow that we'reseeing is giving a graphic image betweenthe lowest and the highest points in theshort term loudness so we can actuallysee how Dynamic this song is playing outas it goes through this we can makevarious changes on how transparent it isor how long of a time we wanted toregister but the bottom line is you cansee you know if it's being totallysquished or if it has a little bit ofrange to it in terms of the Dynamics youhave another check that when you hit itit shows the curve smoothing if I hitapply now you just get these kind oflike little lines which are less visualto see personally I like the curvesmoothing on there it still shows thesame thing but the smoothing is a muchmore drastic visual thing to see if youmake any of these these changes to theaccess or the you know the way thingslook you can go down and make that yourown preset as well which is veryvaluable but where all this stuff comesinto play is when you can take otherrecordings you know other referencesother tracks that you have and see wherethey stack up and then see where yourtrack Stacks up on all kinds of levelshere from your momentary or yourshort-term loudness or the dynamic rangeof it or the integrated loudness any ofthese things so here just for fun andeducation I've brought in a commercialreference track a top hit you knowGlobal top hit and what's fun to look atand observe on these kind of things youcan see how it lines up again with thereference axises that I put in here thenegative 10 and the negative 14. I can'tplay it on the video but when you playsomething like this which you can youjust play it just like you would anyother song the cursor will move alonghere and you'll be able to actually seein real time how different points of thesong affect the loudness typically theseareas where you see these dips that'swhere the kick or the bass drops out fora minute or some you know majorbreakdown with just the vocals left inbut you get a real feel for you know howthe production affects the loudnesson a commercial you know mixed masteredsong also you can observe their dynamicrange spread do you have here over thewave and over the whole songso you can just gain so much and thenwhen you bring your song in and look atit it all starts to you know cometogether a little bit in terms of youknow what you're actually seeing withthe data here when you can see somethinglike this from the beginning to the endof the song It's Just Another Dimensionthen when you look at you know a readoutfrom an analysis it says yeah your songis playing at you know whatevermomentary short term or integratedloudness when you can see this you'reactually seeing what's happening in realtime through the song and you get to seethe whole thing which really gives you aperspective on it allanother interesting one to look at ifyou hit the one that says integratedloudness and uncheck everything elsethen you get some idea of the overallloudness and what you notice many timeswith this is you won't see as many dipsor things like that because it's lookingat the whole integrated overall loudnessif I check only the true Peaks and applythat this is something that's you knowpretty hard to make any sense out ofwhen you're looking at it from a fardistance like this something you maywant to zoom in more to see butbasically you're seeing that the truePeaks is basically how close to thedanger zone are you getting and thereally valuable information that I getfrom thisback in the day I used to really Mastermy songs way too hot and what wouldhappen if you go back into this loudnessTab and you check your settings you makesure when your true Peaks are checkedthat you have this check that says onlyshow the hot points what you get isthese red marks which show where thetrue Peaks have you know caused innersample clipping many times you'll hearvarious people say oh yeah the two peaksand the inner sample clipping reallydoesn't matter in today's digital musicthe only thing I can tell you is I haveto differ because I have experiencedfirsthand what it's like to have yourmusic played back on maybe a systemthat's maybe not exactly perfect and andwhen you have this kind of true Peakinformation in here like this on asystem that can't really handle itit's really unpleasant and quiteembarrassingwhich has been my experience so you wantto avoid these little red marks up herepretty much at any cost at least that'swhat I do now going forward I make surethat there is never any kind of truePeak information showing up here showingthis inner sample clipping and withoutsome kind of graph or meter like thismany times you won't even know this kindof a thing is happening in your song andyou won't even know there's an issuethere so things like this visually arejust very valuable all right so that'sgoing to wrap it up for today as alwaysif you haven't grabbed your navigationguide be sure to grab that before you golinks to all the content on this channelever growing free to use constantlybeing updated and the idea there is tohave information at your fingertips soyou don't have to work so hard next timeyou get stuck on something so theloudness tab in the waveform display theobjective today was hopefully when youlook at this you can see that it's invarious layers and you can show or hidethese various layers and have some ideaof really what you're seeing and how youcan use these tools to hopefully allowyou to interpret your own music and seewhere there may be issues or wherethings are working exactly the way youwant them to just one more great tool inthe wave lab Arsenal and there iscertainly a lot of those here as alwaysit's great to have you guys here I'llsee you in the next video