LUFS and compression

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Re: LUFS and compression

Post by The Elf »

Zukan wrote: Sun Jul 03, 2022 12:32 pmThe mix itself and how the dynamics breathe is far more important than a selected target.

Amen
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Re: LUFS and compression

Post by Aaron Straley »

Thanks for all the advice. Everything makes sense.....except part of my confusion is that I keep seeing conflicting LUFS ceiling numbers posted on the web. Also, that some streaming services normalize their music to a set LUFS level, while other do not. If it's low, they don't turn it up. I post to Sound Cloud lately and noticed there is greatly varying info out there. The article below gives LUFS for sound cloud from -8 to -13? I saw another where a guy actually measured the songs on each platform and said Sound Cloud was closer to -8 than -13. That is a big difference. Is this truth or fiction?

Mastering to -14 would open up my mixes and make things easier for me. I just dont want my tracks to be noticeably lower than others. My mixes sound really open at -16, if I compress and gain them up to -11, they sound pretty squished.

https://www.masteringthemix.com/blogs/l ... nd-youtube
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Re: LUFS and compression

Post by The Elf »

List of standards on this page:
https://youlean.co/loudness-standards-f ... son-table/

-14LUFS integrated / -1dBTP is about as close to a streaming 'standard' as we have. If you want a 'target' then that would see you OK in many, if not most, circumstances.
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Re: LUFS and compression

Post by RichardT »

Aaron Straley wrote: Sun Jul 03, 2022 1:18 pm Thanks for all the advice. Everything makes sense.....except part of my confusion is that I keep seeing conflicting LUFS ceiling numbers posted on the web. Also, that some streaming services normalize their music to a set LUFS level, while other do not. If it's low, they don't turn it up. I post to Sound Cloud lately and noticed there is greatly varying info out there. The article below gives LUFS for sound cloud from -8 to -13? I saw another where a guy actually measured the songs on each platform and said Sound Cloud was closer to -8 than -13. That is a big difference. Is this truth or fiction?

Mastering to -14 would open up my mixes and make things easier for me. I just dont want my tracks to be noticeably lower than others. My mixes sound really open at -16, if I compress and gain them up to -11, they sound pretty squished.

https://www.masteringthemix.com/blogs/l ... nd-youtube

Soundcloud contains all sorts of stuff of varying quality so I wouldn’t worry about it.

You’ve highlighted the key issue - producing something that sounds best vs producing something that fits in with the ‘standards’ of your genre.

Only you can decide where on that continuum you want to be! In your circumstances, speaking only for myself, and not knowing your genre, I would try -14 as a target and see how much limiting is going on and whether it has an audible effect. Often I find I can raise a track a couple of LUFS with only a few seconds of actual limiting going on, and it’s usually inaudible.

If there is a lot of limiting going on and it’s audible, then you have decisions to make.
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Re: LUFS and compression

Post by Zukan »

Some companies, like Spotify, allow users to turn off normalisation on playback. However, LUFS meters are tools that give you pertinent information about the mix in realtime: something PPM never really gave us.
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