ARLOUD brings a finished programme to the loudness the place you are sending it asks for, and keeps the true peak under a ceiling you choose. Two numbers, and it tells you what each one cost. It works by measuring rather than guessing. The loudness of what arrives is measured the way every platform measures it — ITU‑R BS.1770‑4 gated integrated loudness, the same figure Spotify and Apple read off your file — and the difference between that and your target is applied as gain. Nothing is chased: K‑weighted energy scales exactly with gain, so raising a programme by 7 dB moves its integrated loudness by exactly 7 LU. We measured that too, and it came out at 7.000. The only thing between the gain and the output is a true peak limiter, and it is there as a safety stage rather than as an instrument: two controls, ceiling and release. Across 36 combinations of target, ceiling and release, on two kinds of material, the output never once passed the ceiling — the worst case sat 0.10 dB under it. That was verified at 32× oversampling, one step finer than the plugin’s own measurement. When the target does not need any limiting, ARLOUD adds one constant to the signal and nothing else: the output measured 151.6 dB below the difference against the input multiplied by that constant. Latency is 163 samples at 48 kHz, reported to the host, and the same audio comes out bit for bit identical at every buffer size.

LOUDNESS NORMALIZER