Will ardour have a LUFS and LU to be available as a option for channel meter and the meter bridge
While not built-in, have you tried the x42 EBU R128 meter plugin ? Works pretty darn well !
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LUFS meters are not very useful on individual channels, the concept applies to the final mix more than individual parts.
Using the K meters on the output bus gets you pretty close (and I think is default on the master bus now), and Ardour does have LUFS based analysis on export. There is even an option to automatically adjust the master bus gain on export to hit specific LUFS targets if you want.
I guess I was thinking LUFS can help with gain staging or when I need to adjust the gain after a plugin make up gain. Apparently those types of meters are more accurate for preceived loudness the. Rms for like other elements that are not low end but I guess a plugin will do
Gain staging is a pretty straight forward technical concern: you want to make sure the signal does not clip (less easy to define on a floating point system, but I will skip over that for now), and you want to make sure the signal is not so low in amplitude that it has poor signal to noise ratio, or becomes difficult to mix with other tracks because the level is too low and the fader doesn’t have much positive gain range.
Displaying approximate loudness perception doesn’t really help with either of those goals, and the filtering required would just waste CPU cycles if you tried to do it for every channel.
Where loudness perception is applicable is on the final output, so that your mixed audio is in approximately the same range as other material. There is a “LAN” button on the master bus in the mixer view that runs the “Loudness Analysis and Normalization” tool to calculate peak and LU values, and show you how the measured values compare to target values (which you can set), and whether it meets recommendations for various targets such as YouTube, Apple Music, etc. The tool also gives you an option to automatically apply gain (positive or negative) to the master bus to hit your targets if you just need to adjust up or down. You can also just cancel and go back to manually apply different gain curves, compression settings, etc. if you prefer.
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I’ll not say “never”, but there are currently no plans to add LUFS to mixer/meterbridge. (LKFS - K-meters are already available).
So far [LUFS] loudness analysis is only available for regions, on export, and via the master loudness-analysis.
I second this. I live and die by how handy this little meter is.
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