All the online streaming services play music back at roughly -14 LUFS, so that’s the level we should aim for when we’re mastering, right ? Wrong.
That may sound strange, given how much we’ve talked about online loudness over the years - but we’re serious. In this show we dive deeper into one of the points we discussed in the last show: why you shouldn't be aiming for specific integrated LUFS values when mastering you music for online streaming. But, why it is still useful to know how your music will be affected.
Topics we cover include:
- A quick introduction to normalization
- How it works
- Why peak normalisation is useless for matching loudness
- Why mastering songs to a specific LUFS value doesn’t work
- So why are LUFS measurements of streaming services useful AT ALL ?
- When Spotify’s normalization fails
- The biggest problem with normalization right now
Links
TMS #31 - What IS loudness ?
TMS #44 - Loudness units 101
TMS #51 - What is the 'Loudness Penalty’ ?
TMS #41 - Eelco Grimm & TIDAL’s normalization upgrade
How loud ? The simple solution to optimizing playback volume online – and everywhere else
Honestly I haven't changed anything regarding the loudness. Still using my normal process, incorporating the dynameter plug in targeting around -12db. Keeping that in the green. Also using my izotope ozone 8.
I can't tell any difference since everybody started normalizing stuff.
Ian, I do appreciate your topics and helpful advice.
But lately, listening to the complete show is kind of exhausting... sorry to tell you that.
It takes almost an hour of listening to get informed about two or three simple facts - wich could easily be summed up in less than 5 minutes.
I would love to have that in a more "down to the point" format - maybe a little more scripted (?) - than just conversational and in random order of appearing facts.
You know what? I uploaded three differently loud versions to Youtube and picked the one that sounded the best. One was K-12, one K-14 and one K-18. I picked K-14 version. Yes, I know it's not a great loudness standard, but it is a bit better than VU. I'm using K-14 by default now, or even VU. Story finished. This is starting to sound like another kind of loudness war... What I have to say is, if you have a great song, it will sound great quiet or loud. If your song is trash, it will sound a little bit better loud. This is probably the reason why there is a loudness war at all. When I hear a new song these days, I ask myself this question: is your song such trash that you have to ruin it even more?
For podcasting Apple has a best practice and says it's best to use an overall loudness which remains around -16 dB LKFS, with a +/- 1 dB tolerance and that the true-peak value doesn’t exceed -1 dB FS. You don't think this is a good idea?
See https://help.apple.com/itc/podcastsbestpractices/#/itcd55a9646a