I'm there too.
I find DR14 perfect! I hope this becomes finally a standard. I have always been putting my two cents in my environment toward this.
For those thinking that it's limiting, think that the idea to avoid the loudness war, is to stick to a fixed perceived loudness, so that nobody sounds louder than anything else. If that's not respected, Jose may think that -13.5 is just there, and then John why not -13.2 if Jose did -13.5, the Marah comes with -13.0 that's onle 0.2 dB above... and four years later we are at -4  . You get it, that's what happened already and what's to be avoided.
DR14 is not a sacrifice, it is very reasonable. I have been using -12 for CD and -20 for 24 bits for years. There is plenty of SNR below and enough headroom above. The cinema industry strictly follows the -20 rule since many years ago. It is a need.
 
Your latest song can sound louder even without compression? And what's the problem in leaving some headrom unused? When you later do a thing that requires more/quicker dynamics, you'll be happy not having to overcompress it to sound as loud.
I also have been using ReplayGain for all the music I hear, at home, in the car, or with my RockBoxed iPod. My librarian, MediaMonkey, analizes the perceived loudness of the track and record separately, and saves the values in tags. All the players I use automatically adjust the playback gain of each song according to these ReplayGain tags. Overcompressed stuff obviously keeps sounding as crap, but not any louder than anything else. It is a big pleasure to hear music without having to adjust the volume for each song or album.
 
Now, the first problem I found: I don't find any technical description of the perceived loudness model they are proposing. Just the RMS level is not enough, a more complex frequency/level weighting is required. I know because prior to ReplayGain I tried to standarize and found that same RMS levels can be perceived as very different loudness depending on the spectrum. But ReplayGain, a public open source proposal that is getting good acceptance, nailed it perfectly. I really hope that this TT-DR meter actually applies some adequate weighting... I just downloaded it and I'll check it tomorrow.
 
The second problem. They are just starting and now the meter download is not free. I had to pay $30 for membership in advance, without being able to access any relevant technical information about it. I won't regret if this ends in a success, but I believe this is not the best way to achieve a  massive acceptance, and that's actually what's needed to be a success.
 
Despite of these little annoyances, I'm going to heartly support any initiative in this direction.
 
 

ReplayGain is a proven algorithm to evaluate overall loudness weighting different frequency bands differently, etc. and I can attest that it works perfectly

And therein is my whole problem with the Pleasurize group. ReplayGain has been around for years, it works well, and if your playback device supports it makes large volume swings between songs a thing of the past. It's like dialnorm for music. Why on earth did Pleasurize feel the need to reinvent a system? At the very least they could've added suport for the latest ITU standard for loudness measurement to a replaygain system. That would've been useful. Plus there's already the loudness/dynamic range meter from TCElectronic. We don't need yet another system to fragment the various loudness systems.  I don't think I'll be supporting them.

Dave,
What I meant is that if you lower the overall level after all the processing, only the level of the output changes, nothing else, not level ratios nor anything. I thought it was obvious. You choose the dynamics and everyting. You may compress as much as you want.
 
Rosabelle,
I agree with you that ReplayGain fixes the issue nicely. If we could assume every player used it, nothing else would be necessary.
But we can not assume that, at least for now, and music keeps been distributed highly overcompressed. Setting a standard for perceived level, like the cinema industry uses, is a good thing anyway. It is not incompatible with ReplayGain, and BOTH can help to solve or mitigate the overcompression plague. The problem is there, is not going to dissapear easily, and we should not disregard any measure that helps.

After testing a bit the DR meter, I'm higly dissapointed. It only uses RMS value averaging, and this is far from accurate regarding the perceived level. The simple documentation has many errors and misconceptions.
At this point I agree that the DR initiative is not very serious.

I wished DR was better. But is still better than nothing, and I'll try to help them improve the measurement algorithm. There is nothing to invent, the ReplayGain is proven to work very well and is open and free, non propietry. I hope they will understand RMS is not good enough for loudness evaluation.

bitflipper
But that won't affect your DR rating, since the DR tool (AFAIK) does not care what your peak levels are, only the dynamic range.

You're right, Dave, I apologize for the confussion.
DR only takes into account the peak/RMS relationship, regardless of level.
LOL, I guess this is worse after any new detail I discover. I would support a standarization of perceived loudness level, not forcibly having to respect a given peak/RMS ratio.
 

i'm bumping this....
because.....

hm, well, i don't know, i'm curious to know where folks who were into this conversation back uin 09, are sitting with this now.

any changes?

"any changes?"




It is the same as it always was.

You can still only go to 0dBFS... no matter what... so if people want it any louder than that they are gonna need a bigger amp or more efficient speakers.

That's not really all the much different than it has ever been.


best regards,
mike

I took a sparse ballad up to -12.0dB RMS average a week ago and it made me feel really dirty.

I was listening to Katy Perry's I Kissed a Girl as a eye opener... I don't think you can compete with -4dB RMS Average unless you write a song just for that purpose.