InterBalance

Loudness against a target

SHORT-TERM is the loudness of the last three seconds, as EBU R128 measures it, updating by itself with no reset to remember in a live show. Within 2 LU of your target the number is white, further away amber, and the line under it says how far off it is. TRUE PEAK beside it is the highest true peak of the same three seconds.

The spectrum against a target

The target is the band in your track's colour and your mix the white line over it. Where the mix leaves the band the gap is tinted, so you see at a glance which part of the spectrum is off and which way. A finer grey fill underneath moves with the music.

Under it, TILT, LOW, LO-MID, HI-MID and HIGH say how far the mix is from the target. Too much bass reads mostly as LOW; a mix leaning dark or bright everywhere reads as TILT.

Targets

Balanced is the neutral line of pink noise. Dance, Metal, Pop, Rock and Schlager are each measured from a set of released tracks and averaged, and the faint band around a genre target shows how much those tracks differ from one another. This is a first set: the genre targets will be measured again from more tracks.

Or learn one: from the mix as it sounds now, at soundcheck or in the first song, or from a reference file, measured whole on its loud parts only. Save a target of your own and it is there in every project.

CORRECT: broad and slow

Off until you switch it on. CORRECT moves the mix's balance toward the target the way you would at the desk, broadly and over seconds: a tilt, a low shelf, a high shelf and two wide bells in the mids, never more than 6 dB anywhere. It listens to the input and holds still through quiet passages and between songs. A band with nothing in it, like the bass in a breakdown, is left where it was, so its correction is already right when the bass returns. CORRECT draws its own curve in the spectrum while it works.

FREEZE holds the correction where you are happy with it, while the readouts and the meter go on following the music. There is no make-up gain, so compare it with bypass at matched loudness.