Hello Widetrack thanks for your kind words about my lengthy post. I am a bit of a fusspot when it comes to levels. The thing is that we can actually continue to work in a completely analog way even in a digital system, you just have to know where the ceiling is!

Real VU's are a great way to go but I bought the BlueCat meter as well just to see how things measure up in the plugin department. The BlueCat is excellent and it agrees pretty well identically with the real VU's in terms of level and ballistics.  Except with the ballistics the meter response is set at 700 ms for some reason and it defaults to that so that needs to be set back to the standard 300 ms which applies to a normal meter. If you don't do this I found the BlueCat meter does not quite reach the same displacement as the real VU meter does and that is because it is behaving more slowly.

Yes the BlueCat will keep your track and buss and mix levels much more consistent. You just have to decide what reference you are going to work at eg -12, -14 or -20. Now -12 is pretty hot and I don't do it usually but I have found -14 works well for a lot of general things and -20 is good for quality album productions. Just remember that if you are working at say -20 then you have got a lot further to go in mastering to achieve a hot level compared to  -12 which is 8 db higher than -20 so you are already 8 db higher up towards your hot end level.

You can park the meter on a track while you are tracking. Make it the first effect in line. You will have to enable input echo for it to work though. You can assign the track temporarily to no output if you don't want the signal to flow right through Sonar and back out.

Park it on busses or your master buss while mixing of course. The idea is to keep the rms meter just hitting 0 db most of the time. What I do like about the BlueCat is that the peak metering is also right along side (unlike a real VU meter) so you can still see what your peaks are up to.

As far as the "The peak and RMS envelopes can be combined together, reversed, modified and recorded as automation curve?  stuff goes I tend to agree with Dave on that. To be honest I have never used it. There is a good tutorial here on that and how it works inside Sonar as well.

http://www.bluecataudio.c...rial_DPeakMeterPro_01/

Basically what it does is track either the peak or rms movement of either a track or a buss and turn it into automation which can be recorded in Sonar and could be used to control another track or buss. But I have not done it so I am not over familiar with it. It could be helpful in certain situations though. Thanks for bringing it up as I might test it and see if it can be used.

I thought that this morning.

I saw Jeff was the last to post on the thread but there was no way i could see his post - until now.

Weird indeed.

batsbrew


his VU meters are faster than yours.


heheh