Getting these statistics is crucial for a weekly summer project that we do for the same client every year. We recently switched over to Pro Tools and we didn't imagine we wouldn't be able to do this in Pro Tools. We've been using pro tools for a little while now, but we didn't realize this feature was missing until summer rolled around. It's amazing how you don't realize how important a small simple feature can be until you don't have it anymore! We had to go back to our old set up for this project.
There is a free way of getting these statistics if you don't have access to any other expensive DAWs or audio analysis software, but unfortunately it is outside of Pro Tools. I hope this is helpful if other people people are in such a situation.
Audacity can give you amplitude statistics if you install the
ACX Check nyquist plugin. In Audacity, select the audio you want to analyze, then on the menu bar select Analyze>ACX Check.
The major disadvantage of this is if you are making constant edits to the audio file(s) in Pro Tools, you have to swap the files back and forth between programs. And if you want to playback in Audacity, I believe you have to close Pro Tools first because Pro Tools takes exclusive control of your audio drivers. So it works, but depending on what your needs are this can be a major pain in the *** solution.
The only way I have thought of getting amplitude statistics within pro tools is if you have have iZotope Rx v4 or later. You can use the RX Connect plugin, which will allow you to use the "waveform statistics" feature in the RX standalone application. While this is not truly "inside" pro tools, it allows you to use Pro tools I/O. I love iZotope RX, but unfortunately at home I only have access to RX2 at home, which does not have the "waveform statistics" feature. So I haven't tried using RX Connect, but in theory it should work and only minimally disrupt your workflow. There may be other expensive 3rd party options as well.
I have spent many frustrating hours trying to find a free or cheap plugin to allow pro tools to do this simple task, before I gave up and looked outside of pro tools. I found a bunch of free/cheap RTAs aax 64bit plugins that can give amplitude statistics in real time, but none which have a feature that can give statistics based on a selection not in real time. And I'm not going to buy anything pricey just to be able to do this.
If anybody knows of a plugin that can do this or a in the box Pro Tools solution, please let us know! I'll even take any VST plugin suggestions, which I can host in Reaper and use its ReWire plugin to get into Pro Tools.
Not knocking Audacity, but it is a little embarrassing to have to go to audacity to do something so simple because Pro Tools is incapable of doing this. Especially because most of Avid's competitors can already do this as a standard feature. I remember be able to do this in Adobe Audition v1.5, which was released in 2004!