Anyone know of a FREE Vegas plugin that will let me select all or a portion of an audio track and give me the average RMS for the selection? I'm having a devil of a time finding a free way to get this info, none of the other audio editors I have can do it either.
I'm pretty sure Sound Forge can give you this but this is across one file. The problem for Vegas and probably most other NLEs is that you're trying to measure it across several events and tracks. Not saying it couldn't be done, just that many NLE's relegate this work to programs designed to edit one audio file at a time.
Of course sound forge isn't free, anyway.
Have you found any non-free plugins that can do this?
That just gives you the peak value, not the RMS value.
The normalise function in SF also adds the ability to normalise to a RMS value with peak limiting. Can be much more useful for matching levels than peak normalisation.
I have Roger Nichols "Inspector XL" and it's a great plugin, however, it gives a sort of "instantaneous" average, not the average of the entire clip. In other words, it gives an average level of the last so-many seconds of the clip, not the "total" average of the entire clip. I want something that gives me the same results as the Sound Forge Normalize function, although I really only want to know the peak and average level as I use the Waves L2 plugin to actually adjust the levels. As Farss points out, normalizing to peak level is useless. I described a variation of the method I use in this thread:
I use Sound Forge for all things audio, including analysis. It would just be convenient sometimes to be able to click on a clip on the timeline in Vegas and be able to get it's RMS and peak audio levels. In the meantime, it's easy enough to open it in Sound Forge.