[PD] balancing loudness

[Frank Barknecht]

Hallo,
hard off hat gesagt: // hard off wrote:

> ok, i'll try [limiter~]  ...that might work.
> 
> at the moment i am using [*~] ...but that requires manual adjustments.
>  i'm looking for a more 'automatic' way so that i can get things
> balanced on the fly, in a live setting.
> 
> is there anything that will detect the 'loudness' or 'density' of the
> sound?  i have everything normalised already, but some things just
> sound a lot louder than others.

For that you should use a compressor. While normalization only scales
the sample so that the sample with the highest amplitude becomes 1,
compression will give your sound more (or less) energy, that is the
area below the samples will get bigger overall. Energy is what is
perceived as loudness.

For how a compressor works you can read for example the effects intro
at www.harmonycentral.com, like: http://tinyurl.com/dosve

I don't know any (good) compressors for Pd directly (maybe limiter~
can be abused as a compressor, too) , personally I use a LADSPA plugin
for compression. There are LADSPA compressors with a so called
sidechain, which you can use to "balance" two sounds. 

Ciao
-- 
 Frank Barknecht                 _ ______footils.org_ __goto10.org__