Scottish developer expands its loudness analyzer:
Founded by two ex-Rockstar North audio developers, Signum Audio’s debut release was a True Peak metering plugin going by the name of Bute Loudness Analyser (£83).
Bute Loudness Suite (VST/AU/AAX) is essentially the same thing with a True Peak brickwall limiter added, and bundled with an AudioSuite version (called AudioSuite Normaliser) for quick offline analysis, normalising and rendering in Pro Tools. It’s available in stereo (£240) and surround (£300) versions, the latter up to 7.1.
Standard Issue
The first thing you do with Bute Loudness Suite is select a preset broadcast, streaming or other loudness/metering standard from an extensive menu, including Apple, Spotify, Tidal and YouTube, as well as EBU R 128, AES, Netflix, etc. The preset establishes the target loudness level, metering algorithm and metering units, and selecting the User preset (of which you can currently have only one) enables all these and more to be manually adjusted in the Settings page - see Under the hood.
The Integrated Loudness panel shows the average loudness of the incoming audio, while the green/red Target Indicator next door shows how far above or below the target level it is. The Range field shows the dynamic range of the source material over its duration.
The four vertical meters and their associated numeric display panels give real-time analysis of True Peak, Short Term (over the last three seconds) and Momentary (the last 400ms) loudness, and RMS levels, in LUFS/LKFS/dBTP/ dBFS, depending on the preset. Metering is switchable between absolute and relative, and dragging up and down on the vertical meter scale zooms it, the meters and the History Graph (see below) in and out. The True Peak and Short Term panels have red ‘over’ warning indicators, and a toggle below alternates all four panels between current and maximum values.
Pros
- Superb metering.
- History View is very useful.
- Wide range of standards supported.
- Supremely transparent.
Cons
- Toggling limiter erases history.
- Can’t bypass limiter while playing.
Read the full review at Music Radar here.
