NUGEN Audio’s DialogCheck Plug-in is a mono, stereo, and multichannel dialog clarity meter. The whole purpose of the software is to provide an objective measure of speech audio intelligibility in a portion of the audio clip or through an entire project.
This is ideally suited for use in television, radio, film, podcasting, and game audio production, as well as post-production environments. DialogCheck addresses an element of editing that has become increasingly important for audio professionals.
Key features
- Supports up to 7.1.4 channels
- Realtime bar meter
- Timecode-locked history graph
- Realtime momentary clarity readout
- Median clarity readout
- User-definable Upper and Lower Percentile readouts
Though poor speech clarity is commonly cited as a major source of television audience complaints, engineers typically listen in acoustically specialized environments that can make it more difficult to judge whether further changes are needed to improve clarity, DialogCheck provides an objective measure of speech, further enhancing the skilled work and creative process of the incredible engineers who craft sound, from novices to experts.
The ability for a listener to understand a piece of dialogue is affected by many factors. This includes language, dialect, enunciation, reverb and effects, loudness of speech and background noise, as well as listener hearing ability, listening environment, placement of speakers and supporting visuals, among other elements. Audio engineers have control over some of these factors, but not all. DialogCheck enables users to easily evaluate their audio to identify sections of speech that might be difficult for listeners to understand, allowing engineers to make informed decisions about appropriate tweaks.
DialogCheck features more than one dozen interface tools aimed at supporting engineers in their dialog editing process, such as the integrated real-time bar meter and history graph. Additionally, the distribution view and numerical statistical values provide an overview of the speech intelligibility of the entire program. This information can then be used to guide engineers to correct issues before testing again. Furthermore, the tracking function syncs the views with the audio playback in the DAW, while ‘Macro View’ highlights the current audio section within the wider historical view.
DialogCheck also has its benefits for pre-production to assess different mic’ing configurations, performance styles, room set-ups, etc., to ensure that raw production audio is already near the desirable clarity levels.
DialogCheck utilizes the Listening Effort Meter (LE-Meter) developed by Fraunhofer IDMT, which allows sound engineers to visualize listening effort during mixing and conduct post-mixing checks to optimize audio quality. Designed to objectively assess the listening effort of dialogue in broadcast material, LE-Meter utilizes automatic speech recognition and psychoacoustic modeling with metrics to evaluate the intelligibility of dialogue.
Like all NUGEN Audio solutions, the new software also comes with a variety of factory settings and presets. Personal presets can be created and saved to later be selected in the featured “Preset Bar.”
While DialogCheck is designed for use in traditional post-production, any audio that includes speech/dialog can benefit from integrating the software.
Pricing
The NUGEN Audio DialogCheck Plug-in is $399 USD.
For more information regarding DialogCheck, visit nugenaudio.com/dialogcheck.
