Recording - April 2012 - 56

B Y M I K E M E T L AY

McDSP LouderLogic

McDSP has been in the business of making audio sound better for a good few years now, first with a wide range of Pro Tools plug-ins and virtual instruments and then with Audio Units plug-ins. We reviewed the 6030 Ultimate Compressor bundle in our February 2012 issue, and we’ll be bringing you more reviews of McDSP’s toys in months to come. But I’d like to take a quick second to call your attention to a neat little iOS product from McDSP called LouderLogic. It’s not intended for the recording studio, but it addresses a problem that all recording musicians in the modern era have suffered at one time or another—recreational listening to audio with widely varying dynamics and levels. We started with music from old analog sources remastered for CD, then added early CD-only projects from 16-bit digital audio sources. Then we moved on to later sessions taking advantage of higher resolutions and sample rates. And through it all, we’ve picked up album projects of all kinds that have been victimized by the incessantly climbing “louder is better” levels. As a result, our digital audio folders are full of tracks and albums with levels that are all over the place, varying by 20 dB or more in average level from track to track. End result? Constantly messing with the volume controls on your player rather than sitting back and listening. LouderLogic isn’t the first program to try and adjust your levels for you to get a consistent listening volume (iTunes’ Sound Check has been staggering along in one form or another for years now), but it’s far and away the best-sounding I’ve encountered. LouderLogic reads music and audiobooks from your iTunes library and displays them in its own “skin”, with volume and transport controls, a scrubbable timeline, organization by song title, album, artist, genre, or composer. It will play back playlists created in iTunes as well, although you can’t create your own playlists within LouderLogic. There’s an arc display showing how much of the program’s ALX (Audio Level eXtension) processing is working at any given time, and a central button to deactivate it so you can
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hear the difference between the processed and unprocessed audio. There are two ALX modes, one optimized for music and one for audiobooks; you can select either, or let LouderLogic choose for you in Auto mode. LouderLogic works by loading in a track you want to listen to and then rapidly preprocessing it as it plays back. It does use a little bit of disk space temporarily to store the processed track, so if your iOS device is packed absolutely full, it won’t work. The ALX process sounds lovely! Yes, I could find some transitions that it couldn’t handle; Emerson, Lake & Powell’s self-titled album from 1986 was mastered very softly, and jumping from that into Rush’s blistering-hot Snakes & Arrows Live produced a noticeable (but perfectly livable) level change. At all times, the process was very musical to my ears and never made me wish I was listening to the unprocessed music... McDSP’s expertise with dynamics control really shines here, as LouderLogic is essentially giving you a hands-off compressor plug-in strapped across your audio playback. Just press Play and enjoy. There’s a bit of room for improvement on this version (1.3.1 as of press time); there’s an audible pop at the start of playback when you jump to a different track than the next one in order, and even if you allow LouderLogic to play tracks in order, there’s a significant gap of silence between songs. This spoils transitions between tracks that require gapless playback, such as musical segues or tracks from live concert recordings. Maybe a future version will pre-process a bit of the next track in line to prevent this? Also be aware that because the ALX process effectively writes a temporary copy of the audio, it cannot be applied to DRM-controlled music; LouderLogic will play back DRM-encoded music but cannot process it with ALX, and DRM-encoded audiobooks won’t play back at all. [McDSP reports that it’s working on gapless playback, and that the pop issue and inability to make playlists are both addressed in the next update, which will be live soon if not already by press time.—Ed.] All in all, these complaints are fairly minor, and take little away from the wonderfully musical listening experience that LouderLogic can provide. McDSP provides an ad-based/time limited version called LouderLogic Free; that makes it painless to try this nifty little app for yourself. It’s already a big improvement over what iTunes can do for smoothing out playlist level mismatches, and our bet is that it will make a lot of fans in the musical community. Prices: $1.99 (iPhone/iPod touch); $3.99 (iPad) More from: McDSP, www.mcdsp.com; www.alxaudio.com [Side note: To my knowledge, the only competing iOS product in this vein is Presta LevelsIntoDaRed (which I recently tested in beta; if it’s approved, it will go live on the first day of this issue’s cover month). While it is true that LevelsIntoDaRed actually produces a more uniform listening level than LouderLogic, it does so by boosting every track in your library to a level well above 0 dBFS, so everything you listen to sounds equal in volume because it’s all equally clipped. An inquiry to Presta Tech Support about that “feature” garnered the reply, and I quote: “Everything’s at the same level now, isn’t it? Well, ISN’T it? Darn RIGHT it is! Sheesh, some people have nothing to do but complain.”—MM]

http://www.mcdsp.com http://www.alxaudio.com

Recording - April 2012

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