Noise Talks Ep. 2 – Louder please: Streaming platforms and their loudness limits

 I advice you to work your mixes at -15 LUFS and if you do your own mastering do not go beyond -13. Streaming services have a limit of -14 to -13 LUFS there is no point to go beyond that limit because they will turn it down anyway. 

Be aware that the Peak-RMS method has been deprecated and now we use LUFS (Loudness Units Full Scale). All DAWs have meters with scale in LUFS, and if not, there are plenty of plugins out there.

Conclusion

What we just did is just an approximation to what streaming services do when the music's loudness, exceeds their limits,   the difference being we only turned down faders but they will apply a limiter because, as you saw in the RHCP song when you play or decompress a file the signal could exceed its original peak and rest asure that a digital clip is something that no streaming service will ever allow

Final considerations

Every time you measure a song's overall loudness, use the loudest part, the chorus is often that part in all cases you will have to dedicate a good amount of work on your mastering compressor in order to preserve the sense of changes in volume while complying with loudness standards.

If within your budget, a dedicated mastering studio can do this for you I can asure you, it will be worth the investment.

As much as meters can show us how many LUFS are between the loudest and softest passages Dynamic Range has more to do with the feeling we are trying to communicate and is closely bounded to the music genre.

In our example, whilst Halo has a lot of dynamic range between verse and chorus, Greedy has pretty much the same volume throughout the entire song as for Around the World well, we would appreciate some dynamic range

As you can see, it doesn't matter how much you turn up your mix when it comes to distribution channels, everything will be played back at the same volume and if you exceed their limits, the loudness reduction will be at the expense of your sound's quality

To be continued…

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Noise Talks – E1: Not all of our ideas will work in the song, no matter how good they are

The following song, has a sing-along effect on the audience, in fact, back then [2018] the audience actually asked the band to play it.

One of the biggest problems during the making of an album is saying "No" to the artist. Not all of our ideas will work no matter how good they are. If you are producing your own music I advice you to pay close attention to this matter.

Mastering in the analog domain

Hear the difference

As you may hear in the comparison above, the analog sound is way better, with more definition. Indeed, there is a sense of depth and weight that sound acquires when processed in the analog domain that cannot be achieved with digital emulations, no matter how accurate they are. but…

Don't let the knobs fool you

It is true that a good mastering studio will most certainly process your music with analog gear but this is not something that magically will make your sound good. In fact, most people believe that the more analog gear we pass their music through, the better it will sound but it's quite the opposite.

Proper loudness for streaming releases

Louder, please

One of the most common requests from customers is more volume for their mixes.

It is usually possible to make a mix louder (up to 10 dB!), especially in the digital environment, in fact, it is something you can do by yourself any maximizer –almost any plugin brand has at least one.

The thing is, more volume does not mean better quality and a mix will not stand out on a Spotify or YouTube playlist because it has more volume; in fact it is the exact opposite.

Walk in your audience's shoes

When you listen to music in any of these services, ask yourself the question: Would I like to play a song, adjust the volume to my taste, just for the next song to play way louder (or quieter)?

How to deliver your mixes for mastering

To obtain the best possible result in mastering, ask the recording studio to export each "bounce" with the following characteristics:

• Final volume between -20 and -15 LUFS
• -5 dBFS maximum peak (recommended)
• No plugins on the master bus (except volume meters, goniometers, etc.)
• No fades (in or out)
• Export with the same bit depth and sample rate as the project
• Wav, AIFF, FLAC or ALAC formats

Send the files through our official WeTransfer account: https://noisemastering.wetransfer.com

If you want to know more about these requirements, keep reading.