"How loud will my music sound online ?" It’s the question everyone is asking these days, and the answer has always been “it depends”. Until now.
In this episode Ian Kerr from MeterPlugs talks about the new tool he has been developing with Ian Shepherd to answer this question. It’s a website called Loudness Penalty, and it’s free !
Along the way we also discuss
- Why -14 LUFS isn’t the right target for online loudness
- Why Ian Kerr decided to make plugins that won’t change your audio - but will make it sound better
- How coding 3D computer game graphics helped him develop LCast and Dynameter
- Why the Ians decided to make Loudness Penalty free
- How to use Loudness Penalty to find out what your music will sound like online
- Why different streaming services all manage loudness in different ways
Links
www.LoudnessPenalty.com
Ian S demonstrates Loudness Penalty
Bob Katz’s K-System
MeterPlugs Perception
MeterPlugs Dynameter
Users prefer musical balances between songs - the proof
How to decide how loud to master
First, thank you to the two Ian's for doing this. This is indeed a fantastic service (and yes, I would still buy it as a plug-in too, if reasonably priced). I just uploaded three files to see how they fared --the first two were a bit on the quiet side, but nothing to fret about. The last one, however, I discuss below...
I agree with Jon T's comment that the ability to upload multiple files would be a great addition. My own comment is that I find that I have to stay on the page for it to continue processing (at least on my Mac, using Safari --have not tried other browsers yet). As a workaround, if I drag it out as a separate page behind this one but still open, then it keeps on chugging... but, if I leave it as a tab then it stops cold when I leave the page.
One last thought, sometimes the results are very surprising and penalise pieces that already seem to be plenty quiet... I just fed it a funk-like live piece I recently mastered. Nugen puts it at -15.8 integrated LUFS, FabFilter and Waves both came in at -15.9, (a stand-alone tool called Expose says -14.8, which I am unsure whether to trust). Nevertheless, LoudnessPenalty suggested that iTunes and Spotify would both knock it down 2 whole dB... Pandora -1.5, YouTube -0.5, Tidal no change. Wow, that was unexpected... Any idea why? (OK, I know, I should wait for the other emails...) Perhaps relevant, the short-term peak was -11, with range of 5 LU.
So, In my limited experience of just three pieces, the LUFS rule of thumb of -14 only works some of the time. It worked for the first two pieces that were mastered to about -15, but not for the third piece that was almost -16 integrated, but still got penalised!
Thanks again,
-Jeff
PS: further to my earlier comment, I looked at one more song by the same band. Int. LUFS of -15.3 (Waves, Nugen) or -15.6 (FabFiler), with a bit more average range at 8 LU, peak at -1.0 dBFS, as before. Also same surprising penalty scores as before: -2.0 (iTunes & Spotify), -1.5 (Pandora), -0.5 (YouTube), and no change with Pandora. [BTW, this was a demo master for a pretty weak mix, that I strongly advised should be re-mixed --but artistic sentiments aside, the loudness was fine... or at least I thought so!]
It appears that the record labels are still mastering for CDs (-9.0 LUFS) and letting the different steaming services do their thing. You can tell what iTunes and hopefully Apple Music is going to do to songs by loading them into iTunes and checking the song info tab to see how much it the level has be lowered. I find your the Loudness Penalty website to be useful for the information. However when submitting music to my aggregator I still use the CD mastering level because I can only submit one audio file. So far this has been satisfactory. Thanks for all your efforts and information.
Speaking as someone who finds the finer details of LUFS extremely confusing, this is an awesome idea! Will be using the site from now on