Free Orban Loudness Meter for Windows now available

[littlejohn]

Projected release date?

And, thanks!!! It's a nice piece of software.

 

[rorban]

Projected release date?

Within a week, I expect. I will post an announcement when it's available.

 

[yeoldeschool]

The license is a bit generic. The loudness meter has no "self-destruct" date, so you don't need to worry about that clause in the license agreement.

Thank you. Now all we need is a free beta Optimod 8500 for Windows to drive it with!

Not to steer the thread off-topic, but on the subject of desktop audio processing, do you think it would be possible, theoretically, to replicate an 8100A/XT as software given today's CPU horsepower? The DSP gods have seen to it that nearly any analog circuit can be modeled digitally, right down to the sound of tubes. I'd imagine that the greatest challenge in emulating an 8100A/XT would lie in shoehorning the horsepower requirements of multiple analog clippers into one general-purpose x86 CPU. If I'm correct, the sound of analog clipping can only be achieved with positively enormous amounts of oversampling - to place the nyquist limit so high that any aliased harmonics falling into the "active" portion of an oversampled medium's spectrum will exist at inaudible dB levels. (Don't your modern boxes achieve the equivalent of 10 MHz oversampling by combining lower oversampling rates with anti-aliasing routines of some type?)

Anyway. In a strange way, I'm serious about this. Many covet the 8100A/XT's sound. And many more of your analog-era hardware designs continue to sell very well second-hand. Seems there's an opportunity there, somewhere. With real-world production of those old units no longer economically viable, perhaps virtual reproductions of your vintage designs would strike a chord with enough processing enthusiasts and audio production/effects/mastering/musician types to make them worthwhile. As an example, a few years back, I spotted this at KVRaudio.com. They were trying their damndest to implement your 222A as a DAW plug-in. Why? Because they loved its sound. Google has Google Labs. Maybe you should create "Orban Labs," with technological curiosities like your developing meter, and vintage processing emulators, for audition and/or sale. Available in stand-alone form for batch-processing WAVs, and as DirectX/VST/RTAS/etc. plug-ins for use with DAWs. 222A and StereoMaxx tools, classic parametrics... why, you could even sell the individual stages of your modern hardware individually for their particular benefits. The 8500's new AGC algorithms, and the automatic re-equalization properties of your five-band compression algorithms, would make two nifty products alone. As a plug-in, perhaps the 8500's five-band look-ahead limiting technology (envelope bricking) would draw some cash away from Waves' Multimaximizer.

And for all of us '80s kids, for release in 2009, a 25th anniversary commemorative edition of the 8100A/XT for Windows XP. So we can make everything on our iPods sound like it did the first time we heard it on the radio.

</pipe-dreaming>

 

[Sgeirk]

Orban's made some darn fine products, that said, I always wished Orban would have made a digitally controlled version of the Optimod 8100, and include a multiband processor in/with it. Instead we got full bore DSP. Great post, by the way.

 

[littlejohn]

Oneof the production types shwed me a set of mic plugins for Pro Tools along these lines. It was most impressive. Tell it what mic you were using and what you wanted, and viola - sounds just like...
I'd love to see something like this which could be used to run an 1100 card or similar.

 

[rorban]

Plug-ins are certainly a possibility in the future. However, piracy is a real concern and has considerably influenced our decision-making in this area. At present, we are more of a software company than a hardware company, but requiring our software to run on dedicated Orban-manufactured hardware makes piracy much less of a concern than it would be if our intellectual property were ported to x86 processors.

 

[rorban]

The first update is now available.

Version 1.0.1:

--Reduces CPU load caused by refreshing the meter’s display. This allows slower computers to operate at the meter’s maximum 100 Hz refresh rate, minimizing flicker.

--Changes the color scheme to improve appearance and to make the meters easier to read.

--Changes the graphic design of the single-bar meter display elements like peak hold to make them easier to read and to prevent them from being obscured.

--On startup, checks whether the computer’s CPU supports the SSE2 instruction set and exits gracefully if it does not.

--Increases the gain of the VU meter by 10 dB for a given setting of the VU Meter Gain control. When the control is set to 0 dB and the meter is fed by a sinewave, the VU meter will now display the same level as the absolute peak meter.

--Clarifies the readme to better explain how the meter interacts with your computer’s sound device(s).

--Moves the Audio Input selector to the Settings page.

The update is available here:

http://www.orban.com/meter/

 

[rorban]

We have released version 1.02 of the Orban loudness meter. This version resolves all of the bugs that have been reported to date. In particular, it resolves the issue with Windows 2000 where the test for an SSE2-compatible processor (introduced in v 1.01) would fail.

Bob Orban