The Loudness Meta Normalizer V1 in Wavelab Pro

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The Loudness Meta Normalizer V1 in Wavelab Pro

hello everybody Andrew Blake from The digitalaudiomanual.com Today We Begin looking at the amazing loudness meta normalizer in wavelab Pro but before we start I want to remind you that there's a link below to the free content navigation guide which is an easy to navigate webpage with links to all the content on this channel and besides that in the near future I'm going to begin adding tips and other bits of information that will only be available there you know things like simple steps that will get you started and up and running quick things that are in the videos but are written down in simple steps that serve as quick reminders when you need information down the road if you're working with programs like wavelab or Cubase plugins or the cable guys shaper Box 2 and many many other projects that are in the works then I know you're going to find just like I have that this is an invaluable study Aid and the other thing I want to make sure you understand is that this is not a simple PDF this is a constantly updated page that has any information that is is new or anytime videos are changed really anything updated and once you have it you will always have the latest information constantly updated so if you haven't gotten it already go to the link below click on it and save it to your favorites it's my gift to you and it's absolutely free Okay so let's get started so if someone were to ask me what is your favorite feature in wavelab I think I would have to say it's the loudest meta normalizer of all the things that wavelab offers and obviously if you hang around here or you're just a user in general you know there's a lot of things there but this one tool just rises above in so many ways and for me personally it offers kind of a science in a way that allows you to just take a lot of the guesswork out of what you have to do when you're trying to master either individual tracks one track whatever you're trying to do one of the things that it's always a struggle is trying to set the gain levels so that you have the loudness you want on your music in some kind kind of predictable consistent result enter the loudness meta normalizer so let's kind of take a rough look at it and then we'll dig into it when you have a Montage as I have right here in front of us notice I have three clips and it's very obvious when you look at these three clips that they are all at different gain levels and if I were to burn this off onto a CD just like this the listener's experience would be very disruptive they would definitely have to be grabbing the volume control between one song to the next because things would be so drastically different and of course wavelab offers various ways to adjust the gain on each clip there's a little gain like on this last clip I can grab it and I can pull it up to a certain degree so I can try to you know visually see if I can match my Clips together I can of course listen to them you know I can play this first clip listen to it play the second clip listen to it you know and adjust them try to adjust them that way the best I can but if I open up the meta normalizer which lives under this process tab if I hit the process Tab and then I go to the meta normalizer I have three levels I can use on The Meta normalizer I can work specifically on Clips there's a check box for the output of the Montage and there's a check box for the master section output most of the settings are identical in each one of these sections but they focus on those sections on how they adjust the actual gain levels for me personally I usually use the clip meta normalizer exclusively I have used these other ones I don't always get the result overall that I'm looking for but they all have value and they all perform a function and we will check them out but just as a first example let me run this one on the clips and watch what happens I have this set to give me a loudness of negative 14 lufs so watch what happens when these three Clips are adjusted with this meta normalizer I'm going to hit apply and now you can see although the some of the Peaks are still different on each clip the overall loudness has now been set to negative 14 for each clip all with a very quick click on a button one thing that is kind of difficult to wrap your mind around with the meta normalizer is that it does not use compression it strictly operates on altering the gain I know for me when I first saw it in action when I would really raise the levels I could not understand how it could be raising the level that it does and not be compressing the signal let me give you an example what I mean in my previous example I had the loudness set at negative 14 lufs let's really bring that down to like negative nine really crush this thing and changing the loudness is if you have a mouse wheel as easy as putting your mouse wheel over the number and spinning it it just turns really easy I'm going to hit apply now watch these levels on these clips now there you go there is a definite increase in the level right and when I was a novice user I would look at this say this last clip for example and I would see all this extra density in the clip but I would see it flat at the very top like this and to me that looked like either severe limiting or some kind of heavy compression I could not figure out how it was raising the level like this and making this signal so dense and yet being so flat at the top and the bottom of the signal it took me quite a while to stumble on to watch this if I grab the gain on this and I start pulling it down you can see that the wave is completely intact the way it originally was all the Peaks are still there but what wavelab will do is it will actually Force this wave as far as it needs to go even past zero in order to achieve the loudness it needs and of course this also depends on some settings I'm going to show you in a second but the point being here is if this wave is raised up like this and it's flat lined at the top and the bottom that does not mean that those Peaks have been shaved off they're just above what you can see visually they are still there by the same token there's no artificial raising of the quieter moments as you would get if you were using a compressor it's simply just pushing that level up farther and farther so if the quiet is being raised it does not mean that the loud has been compressed or softer the loud is still there it's just out of sight Now The Meta normalizer is designed to try to avoid clipping unless you give it Specific Instructions to ignore that let me demonstrate that again let's say we have our three Clips like this at various drastically different loudness I go to my meta normalizer and I'm going to leave it at the negative 9 which is enough to actually see you know it really raise these levels but if you go down the list you have some options in a drop down here and in this drop down you have three options one says ignore the Peaks one says limit the digital Peaks and one says limit the true Peaks and depending on your knowledge of what digital Peaks and true Peaks are that may take you a second to kind of get an idea of what's Happening as well if you say ignore Peaks then just like it says these Peaks are going to go wherever they need to go to try to get this clip to match the level you've set that being if this was like negative 14 we're trying to achieve probably no problem at all these Peaks will probably still stay way below the zero mark on the other hand if we say you know like we just did negative nine in order to reach negative nine these Peaks are going to get thrown Way Beyond the zero point to get the bulk of this signal up to negative nine and if you say ignore the Peaks it will do that this meta normalized will raise this level as high as it has to go to get the bulk of the signal to negative 9 and just ignore the Peaks they'll just be up there somewhere out of sight on the other hand if you switch to the digital Peaks what you're telling it is at zero you better stop don't go any further because I want you to limit it you know when you come to the zero point zero being the you know the digital peak level if you go beyond zero you're into clipping and this whole thing is trying to avoid any kind of clipping so what happens in this case is the meta normalizer it starts making its own decisions in other words if it can't reach the level it has to and sometimes it can't because if I say negative nine but I tell it to limit the digital Peaks there's no way this signal can be raised to negative nine without clipping those digital Peaks they're just not going to make it so instead what the meta normalizer is going to do is it's going to say all right I'm going to go as far as I can for example like this little point right here it's going to hit the zero point I can't go any further this clip may only reach negative 12 before that Peak starts hitting that zero Mark so if I've told it to limit the digital Peaks The Meta normalizer is only going to go as far as it can and then stop and that used to drive me crazy because I didn't understand in the beginning how I could be punching in into the numbers and say look I want this at negative 9 or whatever I want it but once I did an analysis on the final signal it would be only at negative 12 or 13 or whatever because if I put the limitation on here that I want it to limit the digital Peaks The Meta normalizer will only go as far as it can before it hits digital peaking now another thing it does is when it tries to get this clip up to the loudness that we've set and it hits a digital piece and I've told it to stop at the digital Peak if there's more than one clip involved like here I have these three Clips then it makes another decision what it does is it says well this clip over here I can't even get it as loud as this one before I start to reach the digital peak of zero so what the meta normalizer then does it says well I'm going to turn them all down I can't turn them all up so I'm going to turn them all down and that's exactly what will happen you will see some kind of compromise between your in this case three clips that I have here to where wavelab will try to get the loudest it can with whatever Peak it can get to and then it will look at the remaining clips and say okay look I got to match these other ones the same way and you'll get this compromise between the three clips and so you may have set this for again negative nine but before it's all said and done with these three Clips they may all be at negative 13 for all you know again a lot of things can be very frustrating if you have these expectations of it doing something but unless you understand how the ignore Peaks or the digital Peaks or the true Peaks plays into making the final analysis that's where you're going to get your final result from so let me show you a couple again examples where we make the difference first of all I'm going to do the one that says ignore the Peaks at negative nine so watch this I'm going to hit apply very dense see they're all up there but they're all reaching negative nine even though the Peaks are way out of sight I mean Ctrl Z out of this now let's do it again but I'm going to show you what it looks like if I limit the digital Peaks I'm going to go to my drop down I'm going to pick the option for limit digital I'm going to apply and look at that it hardly raised them at all to be honest although the very quiet one look at this very quiet one in the end that was like basically hardly a line and that one got increased quite a bit but you can see above there's a lot of space it's not the waves not just crushed out of sight anymore now I'm going to control Z out of this let's do this last option let's limit the true Peaks hit that hit apply and that's slightly lower true Peaks sometimes are Peaks that actually do go above zero and they have to do with inner sample peaking and you know digital audio conversions and all kinds of other things that are actually calculations more than just actually what you see but wavelab can understand what true Peaks are and bring that into the calculation and then it will change these waves accordingly all right that's going to wrap it up for the day as always if you haven't grabbed your navigation guide be sure to click that link below this video and get that for yourself it will make your learning experience so much better has all the content on this channel in order and easy to click links it's designed to help you to find the stuff you want to find without having to search through playlists of videos here and there so the meta normalizer we're going to stick on this topic for a little while I have some things I definitely want to share there's information to be gained just by looking and using it but there's also some information that I have that to be honest I don't think you're going to get anywhere else I have some observations I have made through using this thing on many many recordings and I have yet to see really anybody else talk about it in the depth that we're going to explore it here so for those of you that hang around here stick around for this one because I can promise you I'm going to give you some real gems on this one as always great to have you guys here and I'll see you in the next video