I need a plugin that shows me exactly the db level of what my rig is putting out…placement would be in-between the mixer and interface, right? … Thoughts, Geniuses?
What about the meter levels shown on the audio out plugin?
You can use a meter widget to show the level of the out channel.
Nope. I have many plugins outputting signal at same time. I need to see what the sum is at any given moment. Thanks
You are using more than 2 channels to your interface?
How looks the wiring?
What kind of db are you looking for, relative to what?
There are a lot of plugins that measure levels and show some db value.
Youlean Loudness meter (if I remember the name correctly, Waves WLM Loudness meter are some, but they measure loudness, not pure levels.
Voxengo Span is a free audio analyzer plugin that also shows db levels, it can show various types of measurement.
There are all kinds of VU meters some of which are free, I believe. And probably pure level meters exist, not sure what’s the usefulness of those would be though.
What are you trying to use it for, fellow genius?
You can wire all your channels to a single pair and measure there.
You don’t need to connect the outputs of that block to the audio interface to avoid summing all your channels, but you’ll measure the level of that sum.
The Weird Al Tour '25. I need to give the Audio engineer a balanced mix which made up of many, many different scenes with many different instrument and samples. If I don’t. it drives them and other musicians, with in ears, crazy
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You’ll need more than a single db value for that. If it were that easy, mixing wouldn’t be a profession.
A loudness meter can help set up various instruments roughly so that they don’t pop out unexpectedly as too loud (or conversely don’t disappear in the mix). It’s a bit of an involved process and takes some practice. But simple level meters don’t say much about how loud a sound is compared to others.
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The Tokyo Dawn Labs TDR limiter 6 GE plug-in has decent dB/loudness/volume/peak meters.
And it’s ultra-low latency compressor&limiter options help to tame peaks before going to FOH.
My very last plug-in in the chain.
See this thread:
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I’ve got three meter plugins. One shows LUFS (loudness), but it’s numeric. I don’t find it very useful in balancing sounds. I’ve also got the Dorrough meter from Waves. It shows peaks and averages, but I don’t much care for the dynamics of the synthetic LEDs. Finally, I have the Waves VU meter. This is my favorite.
First, a good VU meter attracts the eye, like sitting around the campfire and having the eye attracted to the flames. Second, the dynamics are musical. You can kind of see the music in its motion. Third, you can learn how it responds to different instruments, like drones and pads vs. voice, piano, and percussion. After a while you’ll know that you want the pads to peak a bit under 0dB and percussion should peak a bit above.
Targeting 0dB for everything gets you in the ballpark. Applying knowledge of which instruments tend lower or higher, gets you even closer. To really balance things, we really need to use our ears.
I think LUFS is great for a full mix and for getting song A to roughly match song B, but it’s not so helpful for balancing single instruments. The tried and true VU meter and a bit of experience, followed by fine tuning by ear, is the clear winner for me.
Which, I think, is what the OP needs, trying to measure the sum of many channels.
But using a loudness meter properly will also need practice, it’s not some magical “get a number right and you’re golden” tool.
Got it. VU can work for that too. Part of the issue with my loudness meter is that I dislike the UI. The window is big, but the LUFS part is small. It’s numeric, with no dynamic, spatial metering. The averaging is too slow with too few options. LUFS isn’t a peak, but I want a more natural rolling average.
A great LUFS meter might be best. I prefer a vanilla VU meter to a poor LUFS display.
Whatever you use and for whatever reason, I think the main point is that any of these tools don’t provide the definitive final answer, but rather guide the user. And you then have to interpret what they show correctly and take action (or not, because maybe sometimes something needs to stick out in a mix.
I generally don’t like skeuomorphic things and prefer a bunch of numbers to the typical VU meter needles, but it’s not like those numbers are somehow more useful to everyone every time.
@RubenValtierra maybe a better question in your case would be to ask the keyboardists here (who constantly deal with sounds that have a wide variety of frequencies, can be wide stereo or mono etc) about how they make patches sound at a consistent level. They might share some best practices (although I suspect the most common answer could be “I do it by ear” 
).
I use three stereo outputs (piano, organ, and synths) and asked our tech to keep their output to my IEM at unity, so I have some idea of what I’m doing relatively… (Of course, this is not the case compared to the rest of the band, but that’s not really my job.)
As the last plugin before each output, I use dpMeter5, which sends the short-term loudness as a numerical value to a text widget.
I aim for -23 LUFS (but still have to adjust by ear).
I found that the Waves SSL G-Master Bus Compressor does a great job before the dpMeter and final gain adjustment.
That being said, trying to accomplish perfect gain staging is a never-ending story for me. 
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Cool little plugin, and the developer seems to have a few other useful utilities, thanks for mentioning this here!
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BTW, It is free, and you can get it here (Mac & WIN):
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Maybe I am wrong, but what helps such a Loudness Meter?
When a sound is thin then the loudness could show low values but for the audience or other musicians it could be way to loud.
The same when a sound has a lot of energy in the low end such a Loudness Meter could show high values but it could be not loud enough.
I think the loudness of a sound can only be measured in the context of the whole Band.
Loudness metering is actually meant to address exactly that. It is a weighted measurement aimed at reflecting human perception of loudness. Regular level meters will have bias towards low end as you say, and also transients can be misleading, which is why loudness metering was invented (for broadcasting, I think, where it’s used to normalize loudness of different programs, and now it’s also used by streaming services).
It is far from perfect, of course, like any metering. But can help to get in the ballpark.
OK, I understand that for a complete mix, but for a single instrument or a collection of keyboard sounds?
What about it?
It’s still a weighted measurement that will assign less weight to low end and more weight to mids, deemphasize the transients - will measure loudness, in other words.
I mean, no measurement will solve the problem by itself, but loudness metering has benefits over simple level or vu metering, when different signals you are comparing have different frequency spectrum characteristics.
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