Airwindows Hit Record Meter (v0.1.8): Free Mac/Windows/Linux CLAP/AU/VST3

TL;DW: Meter uses analysis of peak energy to rate songs for hit potential.

github.com/airwindows/Meter/releases

Here's what's new in version 0.1.8! Meter now focuses entirely on peaks (RMS is used for some internal calculations and the size of the dots in the Zero Cross section).

Each section is labeled: Peak Loudness, Slew Brightness, Zero Cross Bass. They all show red, blue and green dots. It's always the same data, just arranged differently, like this…

Peak Loudness shows the dots on a dB meter (labelling the horizonal lines as -6, -12, -18, -24, and -30 dB). This is the same as a normal RMS meter, except it's only showing peaks: if they are not showing up at the bottom of the meter, the RMS loudness is too loud to let them go down there.

Slew Brightness arranges the dots by slew factor, so brighter ones will be higher (as a rule).

Zero Cross tracks how long the audio could go before crossing zero, so this is not only presence of low bass, it's also about whether there are higher frequencies to interfere with that bass. It's also labelled now, at 200 hz, 40 hz and 20 hz (which is the bottom of the meter). Again, it tracks not just whether bass exists, but whether it's allowed to dominate. If you notice, there are lines higher than 200hz around where the 'Zero Cross' label is: those lines are 2k and 20k, and most audio shouldn't even get near there for zero crossings. Refer to music you like as a reference for how this ought to look.

There's a line of text now that tells you about three things: the original Loudness measurement (which isn't RMS, it's the raw density of how many peaks are present), a new measurement for novelty (how much the pattern of peaks changes, making a different sound), and a measurement of how many bright, loud, and dark peaks happened. Dark peaks aren't always bass, they're just peaks where the slew isn't high enough, just as bright peaks are all slew and treble. Meter now keeps track of this to tell you if you're over-bright or over-dark.

And there's a rating, like there was before. But now it's not 'peak loudness'. Now it's novelty MINUS peak loudness and MINUS how off-balance the bright/dark peaks are. The idea was to track down roughly how striking the sounds were, even though Meter doesn't know what a note is or understand music per se. Turns out, this new Meter is very good at singling out breakthrough songs that broke a big act (for instance, its favorite Led Zeppelin track is Good Times Bad Times) and career-making records like Sergeant Pepper. It likes punchy, dynamic music like the B-52s and the Beastie Boys and Chic. Its favorite Aerosmith track seems to be Walk This Way, and it's sorted the Yes tracks I've so far recorded, into a list that is almost exactly sorted by record sales.

If you think that's interesting and want to mix stuff to make Airwindows Meter happy, the results you get will probably sound good once you're done. I can't make it give you Top Ten hits, that stuff was back when we had a record industry. But it can help you get striking and exciting sounds. You can also use it to match other music you know: study the meters and make your music match what you see on your target music and that should help. But to pursue hits as Meter understands them, allow for a bunch of headroom and then use up ALL that space with peak energy. It likes things a little dry, not loads of reverb, and it likes it when the arrangement leaves spaces: if possible, space like the song is breathing in tempo with the desired music. Definitely pay attention to whether bright/dark is out of balance, but you can either go for the hi-fi sound of bright/dark peaks, or you can just try to make all the sounds peak out as loudly as possible, which means mixing everything to be loud and sonorous. Both work.

There's more tools coming for working with all this, but this is a good update for being able to keep track of what you're doing with all those plugins. If Meter breaks or fails to work for you, I'll try to get help as to fixing it: I'm out over my skis working with JUCE but with the help of the Pamplejuce framework, I can try to provide GUI plugins. Have fun!