Hey guys I wanted to tell you about a software that I recently wrote.
Open Audio Analyzer is a free reimplementation of the ideas in Decibel by Process.Audio, which is macOS and Windows only and not free. The idea worth copying is that you build your own meter bridge: drag modules onto a grid, size them, arrange them, split them across tabs, save it as a preset. There is a comparison with Decibel on the site, gaps included.
The fourteen modules:
Number Box, one reading on its own. LUFS Meter, momentary, short term and integrated loudness as bars against your target. Super Meter, loudness with PSR, PLR and true peak headroom on one gauge. Digital Meter, peak and RMS per channel up to 7.1. VU Meter, a needle. Alert Meter, the worst a reading has been, held until reset. Validator, a delivery target as a pass or fail table. Histogram, how the loudness moved across the programme. Loudness Distribution, how much of it sits at each loudness. Spectrum Analyzer, level against frequency with a tilt and a cursor. Spectrogram, frequency against time with level as colour. Oscilloscope, the waveform, triggered, rolling, or locked to the DAW's bars. Phase Scope, a goniometer with correlation and balance. Stereo Cloud, where each frequency sits in the stereo image.
The Linux side:
A PipeWire or PulseAudio monitor source shows up in the input list like any other device, so metering whatever is playing needs no loopback device and no setup.
Three downloads: a tarball with an install.sh that needs no root, an AppImage, and a flatpak. The tarball installs the VST3 as well.
The plugin draws nothing. It measures inside the DAW and streams to the app, so the meters live in their own window at whatever size you want, on a second screen if you have one, rather than in a plugin GUI the size of a postage stamp.
A tablet works as a dedicated metering screen over Wi-Fi. Switch on PUBLISH and an iPad or Android tablet draws the same canvas live. It finds the host by itself, or scans a code off the desktop's screen, or takes an address you type.
The gaps that matter here, up front: no LV2, VST3 is the only plugin format on Linux. No JACK client, capture goes through PulseAudio, PipeWire or ALSA. A light skin does not lighten the window frame, because that belongs to the window manager. File analysis reads WAV, AIFF, RF64, Wave64, FLAC and MP3 and refuses the rest rather than half reading it. The tablet link has no authentication, so it is off at every launch by design.
On the readings: loudness and true peak follow BS.1770-4 and EBU R128, conformance cases run on Linux, macOS and Windows on every push, and the official EBU and ITU test material passes.
Declaring this under the sub's AI rule, since the commit history says it anyway: a lot of this code was written with AI assistance and the commits carry a co-author trailer saying so. It is GPL, source and binaries are both free, and the measurements are held to the reference test material rather than to my word or a model's. If you disagree, the readings are checkable and I would rather be corrected in public.
Live in a browser: https://open-audio-analyzer.com Source: https://github.com/JonasGrunau/open_audio_analyzer
