Dynamic Range (DR) meter 🎧

The algorithm has been reverse-engineered using the available information and officially endorsed software to calcuate the DR value. The analysis results of drmeter are verified to be within a ±0.5 absolute tolerance from the results produced by officially endorsed software (see #testing).

This project is in no way affiliated with the Pleasurize Music Foundation or its Dynamic Range Project.

Installation

The recommended method for using drmeter is with uv and uvx specifically:

uvx drmeter --help

Any regular pip install drmeter will do, too.

There is also a container image available at codeberg.org/janw/drmeter:

docker run --rm --tty --workdir /src -v "$PWD:/src" \
    codeberg.org/janw/drmeter --output json path/to/files

Usage

See drmeter --help for usage instructions. drmeter expects a single path to a file or a directory to analyze, and defaults to an "animated" progress display, emitting the results to stdout in the process.

$ drmeter 'Nobody There (Beautiful Scars).wav'
Analyzing Dynamic Range of Nobody There (Beautiful Scars).wav ...

╭──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
│ DR            Peak          RMS   Filename                           │
├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ DR12      -0.10 dB    -15.02 dB   Nobody There (Beautiful Scars).wav │
╰──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯

Using the --quiet/-q flag will silence most of the output and only print the calculated DR score to stdout:

$ drmeter 'Nobody There (Beautiful Scars).wav' -q
DR12

Alternatively drmeter supports a more detailed JSON-formatted output using the --output/-o json parameter, including both per-channel and totaled results. Using the --output parameter redirects the progress display to stderr, so that the formatted output can be piped to other applications or to file. If you do not require the progress display, it can be silenced using --quiet/-q here, too.

# Save a copy to file
$ drmeter -ojson -q 'Nobody There (Beautiful Scars).wav' | tee dr.json
{
  "filename": "/…/Nobody There (Beautiful Scars).wav",
  "dr_score": [
    11.93,
    11.63
  ],
  "peak_db": [
    …
  ]
}

# Parse JSON using jq
$ drmeter -ojson -q 'Nobody There (Beautiful Scars).wav' | jq '.[].overall_dr_score'
11.78