Visual audio analyzer based on the following design ideas:
Recognizability & Having a Fixed Reference
The meter aims to be preset based rather than being freely customizable. This may seem like a sad limitation, but the idea is that, if you visit someone else who are also using this meter, you will immediately be able to recognize which display mode is used without first going through the whole preferences section. A bit like how many sound studios keep a pair of NS-10 speakers around because "everyone knows them".
Simplicity
Not offering a plethora of exotic adjustments prevents inexperienced users from ending up with a bad configuration.
And when installing the plugin on a new system, no transfer of settings or presets will be needed.
Full Volume Range Coverage
Most software meters use a logarithmic scale, which means you cannot see all the way down to -inf dB (no sound).
Quick Meter solves this problem by using the function x^3 for scaling. This also prevents squeezing the important area around 0 dB together often seen in other plugins.
More To Come
This visualizer is my lab for strange experiments. The "Amplitude" view is an example of this:
It shows a histogram over how loud each sample is. Whether this is useful or not is hard to say.
Some day I might change or remove it.
Meters
The meters on the right side are not related to the mode buttons at all.
The tall one shows the volume, peak and RMS.
"Harsh" one shows perceived loudness, taking into account that mids and treble tends to sound louder than deep bass.
"Sub" shows how much subsonic content is present. Values below -60 dB means there's no reason for concern.
Modes
Currently the following modes are available:
Spectrum: Standard frequency analysis of the signal in mono from 20 to 20000 Hz.
Low (bass): Frequency analysis of the mono signal from 5 to 200 Hz. Because of the length of super deep bass waves, the update rate is lower than usual.
High (treble): Frequency analysis of the mono signal from 2000 Hz and all the way up.
Stereo: Same as the normal spectrum, but showing the side signal (left - right) instead of the summed mono signal.
Amplitude (volume histogram): This view shows how much of the signal is loud vs. soft. It tends to be able to reveal things like distortion and compression. The actual purpose is not yet fully clear.
BPM: A very crude tempo detector which is capable of analyzing multiple tempos at once. This is still work in progress.