In this free video tutorial, our resident loudness guru, Mike Thornton, takes us through how to use the TC Electronic LM1n loudness metering plug-in.

TC Electronic’s LM1n measures loudness using the exact same algorithm as its bigger brothers, the LM2n and LM6n, which we featured recently. The LM1n displays the key numbers for Program Loudness (I) and either Loudness Range (LRA), Max Momentary Loudness (M), Max Short Term Loudness (S) or Sliding Loudness (10 Sec) as well as True-Peak clipping. TC Electronic developed the LM1n as a simpler solution for those who have found that they sometimes need to deliver content that complies with a certain broadcast standard, including outside broadcast production workflows.

The advantage of the LM1n is that it doesn’t take up much screen real estate, as you can see the comparison between the LM1n, LM2n normal size and the LM2n Big display. The LM1n’s simpler display also makes it ideal for multi-skilled staff and for use in other sectors like mastering for music streaming and albums.

In this tutorial video, Mike covers how to use the baby in the TC Electronic plug-in loudness metering family -  the LM1n showing how to use the LM1n in CD and album mastering workflows. As part of the process of assembling an album, the mastering engineer will adjust the relative loudness of each track so that when the album is played as a whole, the listener doesn’t have to adjust their volume control because some tracks are too loud whilst others are too quiet. Now with a loudness meter like the LM1n on the CD Master preset, you can run each track through the LM1n and get a quantitative measurement of the loudness of each track.  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.