Solid State Logic has released X-ISM, a free "state of the art" VST/AU plug-in which can interpret inter-sample peaks, allowing engineers to make informed judgments about the resultant sound quality of the mix.

There is currently a trend in the in the audio industry known euphemistically as 'The loudness war' in which the engineering process is driven to produce a product which is as loud as is technically possible within the constraints of the medium. Debate rages as to whether this produces problems that degrade and distort the audio. One reason for this distortion is often blamed on the presence of 'inter-sample peaks', where signals that are usually missed by the Fs sampling of DAW meters, may actually exceed 0dBfs in reconstruction from digital to analogue domain in some Digital to Analogue Converters (DACs).

X-ISM uses significant processing to provide a combination of up-sampling and filtering that mimics the operation of an oversampling DAC’s reconstruction process. The result is a meter that shows inter-sample errors and provides a useful tool that most DAW metering misses.