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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