In this video, we’re going to continue covering the Ui Design view and look at the Meter object. In addition to simply having meters available in custom panels for monitoring, we’ll also cover unique ways to use the meter object to add more visual pop to your panels. The Meter object can be found in the Common Controls section of the Control Library.  
In this first example, I’ve got a meter object in my DSP configuration and I’m going to enable selection mode from the factory panel to drop this meter directly into my panel. Here we can see the meter with the appropriate scale since it already has a parameter bound to it. This meter also comes in just as it is shown in the meter object’s factory panel, with the “Show Scale” already enabled and the scale displayed on the right of the meter only. In the Properties window, the object has the usual naming, workspace location, and sizing options. The object can also be interacted with directly in the workspace to move or resize. 
The orientation of the meter can be changed here between vertical and horizontal. This selection is for which side of the meter the scale will display, and can be left, right, or both for vertical meters, or top, bottom, or both for horizontal meters. Stepping is referring to the dividers here on the meter. This first number is the height of the indicator in number of pixels. The second number is the height of the divider, or space between indicators, also in pixels. 
Next we have some options for the scale display. First is text font and size. Notice that making changes to the scale text can also affect the display of the meter indicators. You can simply resize the meter object to also adjust the indicators. Next is color and opacity of the scale text. Padding is the space in between the indicators and the scale. Notice that the indicators get smaller as I increase the padding size here. Let’s turn off the stepping and see what this looks like in the panel now. Let’s also add a gain control to this panel so we can see the real time display of the meter. Notice that the meter is smooth and continuous without the steps. Let’s enable the steps once more to see the difference. 
Next let’s talk about the meter style section, which is how the meter is displayed. “Staging” allows us to build different color zones for the meter. Additional stages can be added using the plus button to the right. Color can be selected for the zone first, then the last number is the percentage that the stage will start at. If I change this, then it’s indicating that the red zone will go from 100 to 90 percent, then we could change the green zone to start from 80 percent to the remainder of the meter. Let’s see what this looks like in the panel now. You can also still disable the stepping with staging. Let’s see what that looks like. Last in the meter properties is the subrange setting. A minimum and maximum value can be set here to limit the control available to the users. Remember that you can always verify what parameter is bound to a particular UI object under the Parameter Bindings section. 
Let’s cover one more quick tip for using the meter as a visual enhancement. I’m going to turn off the scale for this meter and unbind the meter parameter by right-clicking the object and selecting “Unbind Parameter”. Now nothing is in the Parameter Bindings section of the properties, and our object displays the exclamation point indicating that nothing is currently bound to it. Now, let’s make this gain fader object the same size as our meter object. We also need to bind a parameter to the meter still. We’re going to be using the gain parameter, the same gain parameter that’s tied to this fader. Simply drag and drop the gain parameter from the Parameters Tree on to the Meter to bind it. Now our meter will display where this fader position is, instead of reacting to what could be source audio that’s never at a steady level. Remember that I’m still using the same staging options we set up earlier. Finish overlaying the fader on top of the meter, then launch the panel. Now, we have a background for our fader that changes color at the different stages of the gain. We could even get rid of this grey background. In the Styles section of the properties window, the “Inactive Color” is this background color and opacity. Simply change this to be transparent and the panel will be visible behind the meter.