Alternatives
A free and open-source
alternative to Decibel
Open Audio Analyzer is a free and open-source loudness and spectrum analyzer: fourteen meter modules on a canvas you arrange yourself, saved as presets and judged against delivery targets, on the desktop, inside your DAW and on a tablet beside the desk. It runs on macOS, Windows, Linux, iPadOS and Android, and it costs nothing because it is GPL-3.0 software rather than because there is a paid tier further along.
It is a reimplementation of the ideas in Decibel by Process.Audio, whose modular canvas is the best interaction model anybody has found for this problem. The measurement work, the architecture and the visual language are our own, and where Open Audio Analyzer cannot honestly match Decibel it says so rather than approximating — which is what the last two sections of this page are.
Side by side
Four differences,
and the evidence for each
| Area | Decibel | Open Audio Analyzer |
|---|---|---|
| Placing a module | Free pixel positioning. | A 24-column snapping grid, 16 rows. 24 divides by 2, 3, 4, 6, 8 and 12, so halves, thirds and quarters are all exact — which is the first thing anybody wants when arranging meters, and what a 12-column grid cannot give you at once. |
| The same preset on another display | Fractions of the window, reconstituted per display. | Grid cells, so a preset is screen-independent by construction: the same layout opens on a 32-inch monitor and an 11-inch tablet with nobody writing responsive code. |
| The dynamics reading | TrueDyn — “the equivalent of peak over average, but in the LUFS world”, shown beside LUFS-S and true peak on one rim of the Super Meter and beside LUFS-I and true peak max on the other. | ODR-S and ODR-I: by that description the same pair, published as a versioned specification defined to the operand, with numbered conformance cases CI runs on every commit. Nothing here claims to match TrueDyn’s ballistics or its rounding, because they are not documented — the numbers go out under their own name and are checked against arithmetic instead. |
| Presets, targets and skins | Three independent axes, including the from-preset indirection. | The same three axes and the same indirection. This one is borrowed rather than improved on: it is the right model, and there was no reason to invent a different one to avoid saying so. |
Four rows, because four is what there is evidence for. Every cell in the Decibel column is Process.Audio’s own description or a behaviour this project examined and recorded in its README. Where we do not know, there is no row — this page is held to the rule the meters are: a quantity nobody measured does not get reported, and a plausible guess is worse than a dash. If something here is out of date, open an issue and it will be corrected or removed.
Beyond the canvas
What you also get,
comparison aside
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Free, and free software
GPL-3.0 for the engine, the application, the CLI and the tablet display; AGPL-3.0 for the plugin, because it links JUCE. No account, no licence key, no activation.
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Five platforms, one canvas
macOS, Windows, Linux, iPadOS and Android run the same application, the same fourteen modules and the same engine — a tablet is not a cut-down build, it is the whole thing that can additionally draw another machine’s meters.
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A plugin that measures the DAW
A headless VST3 (and AU on macOS) streams the DAW’s audio and its transport to the application, so the meters read what the session reads and the playhead is the session’s playhead.
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A command-line analyser
oaa measures a file offline and exits non-zero when it misses the delivery target, which is what puts a loudness check in CI beside the tests.
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The meters across the room
A tablet on the far side of the studio mirrors a tab over Wi-Fi, drawing the desktop’s published frame with the desktop’s own painters — one measurement, two screens.
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Held against the reference cases
EBU Tech 3341 and 3342 run in CI on Linux, macOS and Windows on every commit, and the full EBU and ITU vector sets on top of them. A quantity this build does not measure reads as an em dash, never as zero.
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Nothing is collected
No account, no analytics, no telemetry, no third-party services. The audio never leaves the machine, and never goes on the wire even when a tablet is watching.
Honestly
What it does not do
A metering tool is bought on trust, and a comparison page that lists only what its own side wins has spent that trust before the reader has downloaded anything. So this is the repository’s Known gaps section, shortened and not softened. None of it is a surprise waiting an hour after the download.
The list that matters more is the one on the other side of it: the fourteen modules, every reading’s definition, and whether this build measures it, are all in the metrics reference.
Try it against a master
you already know
The fastest honest comparison is your own material: open a master whose numbers you know and see whether these agree. The live demo on the front page is the real application in a browser tab, replaying one recorded measurement through the real engine; the download is the same thing with your own audio in it.
Decibel is a product of Process.Audio, and any trademarks named on this page belong to their respective owners. Open Audio Analyzer is an independent project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Process.Audio.