The LM1n is the baby in the TC Electronic plug-in loudness metering family. The advantages of the LM1n is that it doesn’t take up much screen real estate, you can see the comparison between the LM1n, LM2n normal size and the LM2n Big display. The LM1’s simpler display also makes it ideal for multi-skilled staff and TC Electronic are offering the LM1n at half price just $39 for a loudness meter but you only have until the end of the month. From June 1st the LM1n will be back up to the normal price of $79.

Configured With Presets

Unlike some plug-ins, on the LM1n there isn’t a Settings tab. Instead the meter plug-in is configured using presets.  There are a selection of factory presets covering the main delivery standards for broadcast work as well as CD mastering, Film and Mobile applications. These presets enable you to use the LM1n for a wide range of applications beyond broadcast audio post production.

Applications For Non Broadcast Work

A typical example of where you can use the LM1n outside the broadcast workflows is in the CD and album mastering workflow.  As part of assembling an album the mastering engineer will define the relative loudness of each track so that when the album is played as a whole the consumer doesn’t have to adjust their volume control because some tracks are too loud whilst others are too quiet. Before plug-ins like the TC Electronic LM1n came along, the mastering engineer would play a segment of one track then jump to another track and play a segment and try and evaluate by ear if one track was louder than anther and it could be a somewhat hit and miss affair. Now with a loudness meter like the LM1n on the CD Master preset, you can run each track through the LM1n and get a quantitive measurement of the loudness of each track. Then it is only a matter of applying the appropriate amount of gain or attenuation to each track and you can be confident that each track will play with the same loudness so that the consumer can enjoy the music rather than having to keep adjusting their volume control.

To make this even easier and quicker it is possible to use the LM1n is a non real-time mode. For example in Pro Tools you can use the AudioSuite version of the LM1n to analyse the clip in non real-time. 

Use A Loudness Meter For On Line Content

For online work,  -16LKFS is becoming the standard target loudness and so if you are preparing online or mobile content then it is well worth using the Mobile preset in the LM1n plug-in. Don’t forget to check the Peak light when you reanalyze to make sure when increasing the gain the peak level hasn’t gone too high so that the audio will distort. This is especially important when preparing content for online and mobile use because the lossy codecs will tend to distort when the audio goes above -3dBTP.