This is all very interesting. Any chance of having an option to normalize regions to EBU R128 sometime in the future ? With this you could just chop speech with different volumes to individual regions and normalize loudness to R128. Maybe the open source libebur128 could be used for the measurement ?
This would speed up editing a radio program or podcast with speech and music a lot.
I guess RMS normalization gets you quite close and may be good enough in many cases ?
There’s already a vamp plugin bundled with Ardour for EBU R128 normalization (used during export and for post-export and region analysis). For music it does not usually make sense to individually normalize to R128 so it has not been exposed. For a complete voice program on a single track. hmm maybe. I think you have a point: it’s not significantly different from RMS normalization.