Determine loudest/peak level in MULTIPLE tracks?

[minminmusic]

Let's say I have 40 pre-rendered tracks sent to me. FX, levels, pans and fades are all baked in but overall, all the tracks can come up volume-wise in unison. Before I make an arbitrary 10db increase...is there a way to analyze all the tracks and determine where is the loudest peak so I can figure out my acceptable headroom to play with? This doesn't necessary have to be done solely in Sonar.

[OutrageProductions]

Click the Track View Options menu, point to Meter Options and select Show Numeric Peak Value. Play through the entire selection length and each track will then show the maximum peak level just above & left of the meter.

Pg 1005 in the PDF manual.

Select all tracks and adjust as necessary. 

Edited May 26 by OutrageProductions

[John Vere]

Above is a easy way that I have used for a long time . The meter will hold the highest reading until you re start playback. But this involves playing in real time. 
 

What I now do is with the paid version of You Lean Loudness Meter you can drag and drop any audio ( or video) to the GUI and in seconds you not only have the max true peak level you have the much more important LUFS.

This tool pays for itself shortly as it can save a lot of time. It is indispensable for Mastering. 

A track could be very quiet but have a couple of loud peaks so peak level is only useful for steady sustained material. It’s useless on things like drums , guitar and piano. 

Well worth the $50 

Edited May 26 by John Vere

[hsmusic]

12 hours ago, minminmusic said:

 This doesn't necessary have to be done solely in Sonar.

If you happen to have Cubase installed use the 'stats' feature. 40 tracks would take a minute or 2 depending on your computer, comes in handy.

[Glenn Stanton]

if you have any one of many audio file editors - SoundForge, Acon Acoustica, RX, etc they all have statistics windows, just drag a bunch of tracks into (e.g.) Acoustica -> Analysis -> Show Statistics. or SoundForge - Tools -> Statistics etc. if you want to go further, you can copy to clip board and paste to your favorite spreadsheet and do some quick graphs across all the files to show you the potential issues or options for each track.

depending on the project - i'll just run it through and read the peaks off the meters. i like the Acoustica stats as the most complete of my tools. i like SoundForge because of the loudness log which shows all the significant levels per 8K samples.

Edited May 26 by Glenn Stanton