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Comments
Yes, they're excellent, aren't they! Still, after working with Pro-Q/C/R/L etc. in Auria, I do miss the glorious full-screens, and the whole box of tricks. I'm not desperate, though, and it's an excellent point about checking something works before spending a ton of money. Thanks man
I think the different services are still using their own algorithms and cut off points even though the claim is there's an "unofficial LUFS standard" in the industry.
Managing these digital levels is still a difficult thing for me after coming from years using the old ADD (analog multitrack to digital mix to digital master). Regardless of loudness war considerations everyone still tried to get as close to 0db as possible without going over.
That practice is still ingrained in me and I have to watch levels real close, everything sounds better louder you know? Do you think -8 LUFS is more workable?
-8 LUFS is crazy smashed loud. Don’t do it.
Streaming says -14. I find my tracks super quiet at that. I’ve been aiming for -12... current one I’m aiming for -11.
I don't want to drag an innocent into the conversation but I think it was @richardyot who posted some really good info during the launch of FabFilter Pro L2 on iOS. I'll have to go digging, but I think he was in that -14 to -10 range too...
Yeah I’m usually in that range but honestly I don’t pay too much attention to LUFS. I make sure I have -1dBTP headroom in Barricade when exporting out of AUM and that it sounds good. Then I throw it into Grand Finale and make sure that I don’t clip 0. So far it has worked ok for SoundCloud. Have to wait til the end of the month to see if it sounds good on Spotify.
It all depends on the eventual platform your music is intended for.
Soundcloud don't do any normalisation, so it's essentially up to you to decide how loud and/or dynamic you want your tracks to be there. There is of course a tradeoff, if you were to master to -8 LUFS then your transients are going to be crushed, and unless you are using a really good limiter you are also very likely to have significant distortion in your final master.
Streaming platforms all do volume normalisation so that when listeners are shuffling through tracks there aren't any sudden jumps in volume between songs. This means that there isn't much point in doing a "loud" master since all that will happen is that your track will have its volume lowered, at which point you've sacrificed dynamics, transients, and clarity for nothing
One issue is that there isn't a single standard, Spotify target -14 LUFS, iTunes -16, and YouTube -13. Aiming for -14 is reasonable compromise since it's not possible to submit multiple masters in most cases.
You can of course master to a different loudness target if you want, for example -11 LUFS, because you think it sounds better. However if you release the track on Spotify the algorithm will simply turn it down to -14. So with that in mind I would argue it doesn't make much sense to target a "louder" volume, since you have no control over what the streaming platform is going to do, you might as well aim for the loudness that they will impose anyway.
Of course users do have the option to disable the normalising algorithm, but in practice hardly anyone does that because it makes the listening experience so much worse: you then constantly have to adjust the volume for each track. And the same goes for Soundcloud, even though they don't do volume normalisation, when I'm listening to tracks posted on SC I simply adjust the volume according to each song, so I don't think a "louder" track is necessarily going to sound better.
One final note I would make is that volume aside, one thing you might be looking for is the compression effect that a limiter adds, which can really make a track sound better (by lowering the loudest transients and bringing everything else up). In which case I would recommend adding a bus compressor to the Master Strip just before the final limiter. The compressor can glue the track and the limiter can then just target the final loudness level - you'll probably find with this setup that the limiter is doing practically nothing other than metering, because the compressor behind it is doing all the work. The benefit of this approach is that you can use a more gentle and forgiving approach than brick-wall limiting to shape the sound of your track, meaning you will have crisper transients and less distortion.
Plenty of people say aim for louder than -14 LUFS even though the streaming services will treat it, because it'll still be louder. Really, my -14s are super quiet. I'm not doing that anymore. I'm deciding between -12 and -11 LUFS ont his current track (just exported a -12 to listen to it), either way I'm leaving with 1db TP room for the streaming normalization to mess with.
But I'm also doing this on a PC, using Ozone, Kotelnikov GE on Insane, StandardCLIP with up to 128x oversampling, and Fabfilter Pro-L2 up to 32x oversampling, etc.
Many streams online are from CDs that haven't seemingly been remastered for -14 LUFS, and they sound OK.
Oh, I make electronic music - that absolutely play into the target levels. I don't want the loudest levels, but I also don't want them "strangely quiet", like -14 LUFS seems to result in.
-14 isn’t for me either
I tend to stay around -12 LUFS for everything...
I have better things to do than render 7-8 different versions for different formats
It is what it is...that’s all the energy I’m giving it
regarding the LUFS I just had this in my mailbox: Mastering for Streaming Platforms: 3 Myths Demystified (from iZotope), might be interesting to some
TLDR:
-12LUFS
Through using eq, compression, and gain staging, I’ve been able to get a pretty loud sounding track at -14 lately. Seems like the way I make adjustments to the gain stages makes a big difference. I try and keep it pretty low in the early mixing stages and start working on loudness closer to the end
I don’t get the logic. Aiming for -12 doesn’t make anything “louder” if the end result is turned down by 2db by Spotify. You have no control over what the streaming services do, so what’s the point in engaging in magical thinking?
If you want a track to sound subjectively louder then add some compression to the master bus and use that to make it sound louder. But aiming for -12 is just a waste of time if the platform then reduces it down to -14.
🤷♂️
Serious question: if a track sounds "too quiet" at -14 LUFS, what happens if you turn your iPad's volume control up? Is it still too quiet then?
The only way loudness can be gauged is in relation to other material on a specific platform. If you can reliably compare to other tracks on Spotify (at the same relative volume) while mastering, then maybe you could logically say a track is too quiet. But if you're just making a subjective judgement in isolation then it's simply guesswork.
Here’s my thoughts on the matter as a whole. A lot of people won’t have normalization off. So it doesn’t matter. For those who turn it off, it does. They are directly comparing your songs to others.
As long as you keep some headroom, normalization isn’t going to kill your mix. So as long as the song sounds good, pump it up as high as you can without killing it.
All of this is assuming you’re producing a genre that benefits from or relies on loudness. Some genres don’t and that’s a different story.
Try this experiment:
Make a 16 bar loop of one of your unmastered mixes.
Make a mastered version (-8 RMS), (-0.1 peak)
Make a Barkfilter version with Tripleband preset (or for even better sound, split Tripleband to 27 bands and use your favorite limiter instead)
Lower the input until your limiter reads -8 RMS and -0.1 peak.
Take each one and give them a “loudness penalty” by making them -14 LUFS.
Now compare the three loops.
Unmastered -14
Mastered -14
Barkfiltered -14