ORIGINAL: WhyBe
Not a plugin, but, perhaps a "right-click" feature in Sonar that would immediately scan the clip for a peak.

What's the purpose though? Tracks aren't going to clip anyway.

Yes, right-click feature would be good. Not just for clipping, but to find the peak quickly without having to play the whole song.

Sound Forge has this, under Tools - Find...
Perhaps the entire process is not exactly quick after transfering the track to sound forge, but it may be faster than playing through the whole song.

Another important point:

Unless this process goes "through" the plugins on the clips and tracks, it will essentially be lying to you. For example, a normalized clip isn't necessarily "normalized" during playback. It all depends on whats going on with the plugins.

ORIGINAL: ericzang

Sound Forge has this, under Tools - Find...
Perhaps the entire process is not exactly quick after transfering the track to sound forge, but it may be faster than playing through the whole song.

Thanks Eric,

I appreciate the tip, but unfortunately it isn't really going to give me what I'm looking for here, for two reasons:

First, if I have to load up Sound Forge and export the file there, it rather defeats the objective of finding the peak quickly.
Second, as Whybe points out, if I take it into SF, the effects of any plugins like Compressor or EQ won't be included in the evaluations.

But thanks for letting me know this, it could be useful at times.

Best,
Geoff

Yeah... It would really be most useful if you could scan through a track post fader if you wanted, and locate the peak. Would be super cool if you could scan through a bus post fader, too. Kind of like a fast bounce... except you would just be looking for the peak location on the output of the fader.

ORIGINAL: glazfolkWhat's the purpose though? Tracks aren't going to clip anyway.

Wait, whadaya mean?  Why woulndt a track clip?

In Sonar 32 bit or 64 bit floating point math doesn't clip.

Bounce to tracks... use your eyes... play through momentary peaks to see how high they get.

This is a good way to not only see peaks but to see areas of the song with lower peaks.

It helps to see average volume and levels by frequency too, but to do that in Sonar you really do need to play back while watching meters.

For people with partial hearing loss, average volume of left and right channels measured independently is also useful.

Depending on your instrument panning, you could have more left channel peaks than right, but more average volume in the right. Then, limiting those left channel peaks might increase the left/right average volume disparity as the volume of both are raised but the limiting largely impacts only left.

For average volume measures, I use the DigiCheck EBU meter. Any EBU would do.

If you want peak measures to be channel independent, bounce to mono tracks and pan left and right. Then solo them together for playback through the obvious peaks... Sonar will measure peaks on the channels independently.

Once you have an EBU meter, you can use the old solo frequency range trick with multiple buses and the Multiband compressors to measure the average amount of frequency for various ranges. I don't do this much, but you could. I usually just watch a spectral analyzer... sometimes channel specific.