alexhedleymusic wrote:...but im still a bit confused as it says on the loudness metre
m,s,i. (medium, short term, integrated)?
Try reading the article that Kwackman linked above.
There are three different measurements options involved in loudness normalisation, but the only one that matters for streaming services is the Integrated measurement and that has to be calculated across the entire track, from start to end. It will generate bogus numbers if you only analyse a part of your track.
The Medium option works much like a VU meter and is intended to help find an initial level in the right ball park when you start a mix. The Short term option measures over a (roughly) 4 second rolling time window and is used primarily for assessing very short tracks (under 30 seconds) mostly in TV advertising.
so you say to read the lufs to -14 but theres three things to look at so how do you read the lufs when theres three different readings?
Ignore M and S, just worry about I, and only worry about it at the end of your track, not during!
And while the absolute limit for True Peak is -1dBTP, it's often better to keep it closer to -3dBTP as that avoids problems when the material passes through lossy codecs (MP3, AAC etc) which many streaming services are using.