How to monitor your stations loudness and levels

General Lighting

Super Moderator
Staff member
I made this video at the weekend to demonstrate how it can be done. The laptop is not high spec, some years old (my mum got it in Malaysia and gave it to me to repair as it had a knackered accu and hard drive). It does have Win7 which is required for the best version of the Orban meter.


I have pushed the level on this mix harder using Adobe Auditions "multiband processor" and a slightly tweaked version of the "broadcast processor" preset, very occasionally the reconstructed peak goes into the red (over 0dBFS) but this should not regularly happen or your listeners may hear distortion. Ironically its people with "pro audio" kit who often produce clipped content as their equipment limits it.

You should always monitor "at the listeners end" (not the studio) so if broadcasting live you will need some friends to help - they can be halfway across the world and use IRC chat or other messenger apps to feed back info. If you are in the same building on the same net connection make sure you have sufficient bandwidth for both the outgoing and incoming streams (TBH if you can reliably stream a live show this should not be an issue).

I used Foobar2000 as the player (with a few tweaks you can get a peak meter rather than a VU meter) and a "virtual audio cable" to the Orban monitor (this may not always be necessary but I had set this up for other stuff I use; also it enables you to keep Foobar2000 at full output level and adjust or mute the speakers if required). This sort of setup (especially the Orban kit) would been about €10 000 had it been invented when I was working as a broadcast engineer (about 15 years ago)!

I was surprised myself Orban would just give away the meter (although it is also an advert for their new soundprocessing equipment) , maybe its to improve their reputation due to commercial broadcasters widely misusing Optimods to make the ads louder (many Communications Ministries now forbid this practice).

foobar2000 player : foobar2000
Free virtual audio cable : VB-Audio Virtual Apps
Orban meter : ORBAN Loudness Meter
 
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Thanks a lot General Lighting for sharing this with our other users, we are sure that it will be very helpful. :)

We are going to move this over to the 'Guides' section of our forum as we feel it would be better placed there and it would likely just disappear amongst the various 'Support' threads on this sub section.

Thanks again. :yes:
 
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