Das-Meter

Live audio Meters for producers: thirteen Meters, two Looks, any colour you like. Das-Meter shows whatever your computer plays, or single tracks from your DAW, as Waveform, Spectrum, Spectrogram, Loudness, Stereometer, Goniometer, Phase Scope, Cepstrum, Oscilloscope, Tonal Balance, Tuner, Stereo Bands and Needle. Put them in a Bar along the edge of your screen or in a window of their own, and make them look the way you want. It's free and open source, for macOS, Windows and Linux.

Designed by Punktmidi.

Download · Install guide · Docs · Tonal Balance and A/B · Kick and bass in the Phase Scope

Two Looks

Every Theme is drawn in one of two Looks, and switching is one click in Settings ▸ Theme.

• Smooth (the default): grids that fade out toward the edges, fills that fade to transparent, and Meters that dim gently in silence; a soft glow under the traces, a gradient and rounded panels are there if you want them.
• Classic: the flat, plain look of earlier versions, pixel for pixel.

The Meters

Thirteen kinds, as many of each as you like. Right-click any Meter for its settings.

Drag a box over the Spectrum to zoom into it at a finer resolution, with its own scale:

Make it yours

Full Theme customization. Seven built-in Themes, and every one of them can be changed: its Look, its layout and every colour. Change anything in a built-in and it's saved as your own copy, which you can rename. A Preset can follow the system's light/dark setting with a pair of Themes, and Themes are plain TOML files you can share.

Everything is in Settings ▸ Theme, with a live preview:

Look

Smooth or Classic, per Theme, in one click.

For Smooth, tune the Glow under traces and big numbers…

…how far the grid fades out toward the edges…

…and the background's Gradient and the panels' Vignette. Dim when silent lets Meters dim gently when no audio arrives.

Layout

Background opacity makes the Bar or window see-through, down to only the Meters' traces over your desktop:

Line thickness, for every trace and line:

The gap between Meters and their corner radius:

And the text size, from 0.9 to 1.5:

Shape cues besides colour add patterns for colour-blind viewers (High contrast has them on).

Colours

Every colour has a role: background, panels, grid, text and accent, and each Meter's own colours (Waveform bands, Spectrum line and fill, peak dots and harmonics, loudness bars and peaks, correlation, the Stereometer, Cepstrum, Phase Scope and Oscilloscope traces, and more). A single Meter can override any of them, so one Meter can stand apart from its Theme:

Layouts

• Bar: a strip of Meters docked to a screen edge, as many as you like of any kind. Resize it, share out its space, or ⌘-drag it anywhere. On Windows it can reserve its space so other windows make room; it can float on top and stay over fullscreen apps.
• Pop-outs: pull any Meter out of the Bar into its own window, and dock it back.
• Window mode: all Meters in one window, split into resizable panes.
• Multiple displays: each window remembers its display and comes back to it.

Presets

A Preset saves which Meters you see, how they're arranged, their settings and their Theme. Changes save on their own; Edit ▸ Undo (⌘Z) takes back the last one, and Revert Preset all of them. Switch with ⌘1–⌘9. Three built-ins, each with its own Theme, get you started: Producing Top-Bar 1.0, Mixing/Producing 1.0 and Mastering 1.0.

Export Preset… writes one .dasmeter-preset file with its Theme inside, for someone else to import.

Where the audio comes from

• System Capture (the default): everything your computer plays, with no driver to install.
• Send Plugins: put the Das-Meter Send Plugin (CLAP, VST3 and AU) on DAW tracks, and each Meter picks which track it shows. They work behind ASIO too, and tell the Phase Scope the DAW's tempo and beat. Each one is named after its track and takes the track's colour.

Das-Meter is light on your computer: it draws only when something changes, sleeps in silence, and does its analysis outside your DAW.

Install

macOS 14.6+, Apple silicon and Intel	Download Das-Meter-<version>.dmg, drag Das-Meter to Applications, then allow it once under System Settings ▸ Privacy & Security ▸ Open Anyway.
Linux x86_64 (Arch, Fedora, Ubuntu 24.04+…), PipeWire	Download das-meter-<version>-linux-x86_64.tar.gz, unpack it and run ./das-meter. There's no Send Plugin for Linux yet.
Windows 10 and 11, x64	Download Das-Meter-<version>-windows-x64-setup.exe and run it. It installs the app and the Send Plugin (CLAP and VST3).

Das-Meter is free. If it helps your music, you can support it with a donation.

The install guide has every step, including the Send Plugin, updates, uninstalling and building from source. The docs explain every Meter and setting.

Building from source

You need a recent stable Rust (1.95 or newer). On Linux you also need a few system libraries; see Building from source.

cargo run --release --bin das-meter   # run the app
cargo test --workspace                # run the tests

On macOS, scripts/macos-bundle.sh builds Das-Meter.app. System Capture only works from the app bundle. To serve the docs site locally, run mdbook serve docs/site.

The screenshots here are drawn offscreen by the app itself, from generated audio. To redo them after a visual change, build the app and run scripts/readme-screenshots.py (it needs Pillow).

Path	What it is
crates/transport	The shared-memory table that carries audio from Send Plugins to the app
crates/analysis	Meter analysis: audio frames in, Meter readings out
crates/core	The headless app core: all app behaviour, driven by events
crates/app	The app: the platform shell and the Meter renderers
crates/send-plugin	The Send Plugin (CLAP, wrapped to VST3 and AU)
docs/site	The docs site (mdBook)
docs/adr	Architecture decisions, with the research behind them
docs/release-checklist.md	How to make a release

Credits

Designed by Punktmidi. Feedback is welcome: open an issue. Donations are welcome too: paypal.me/forpunktmidi.

Licence

Dual-licensed under MIT or Apache-2.0, at your option. Contributions are accepted under the same terms. The crates it's built from keep their own licences, listed with their texts in THIRD-PARTY-LICENSES.md; among them, Symphonia (audio file decoding) is MPL-2.0 and used unmodified.