There’s also a cool intelligibility section, if you’re doing dialogue-related stuff. You could also add some compression, limiting or harmonic distortion to increase the loudness. But LUFS will allow you to get much more accurate data, and can help you understand why your mix sounds the way it does. With 10 years of music production experience and some marketing chops, I head up the content here at EDMProd. Ableton Live users can fire up the Multiband Compressor’s OTT preset, but all … The dynamic range is the dB difference between the highest and lowest ‘true peak values’. So if you play your track from start to finish while metering, the LUFS value at the end will be the average volume of your whole track. LUFS takes into account ‘loudness perception’, and this is based on what is known as the Fletcher-Munson Curve. These true peak values are estimations of the analog representations of audio waveforms, rather than just the digital peak. At this loudness, the limiter reacts less transparently to the audio. This has gotten higher and higher over time, as limiting and maximizing has gotten more sophisticated with the algorithms, allowing music to become extremely loud without any obvious repercussions. This is where LUFS comes in. Even on Spotify, they don’t sound all that bad personally. The loudness war. But those things are still hard to get right. It simply analyzed a signal over time and gave the average dB reading for it. In short get louder and keep your dynamics intact. If you’re a producer, mixing is even more key to getting a clean and loud mix. They should go last on your master buss, after any limiters or effects. This is because humans don’t hear frequencies evenly across the spectrum – some we hear louder than others, and some a lot quieter than others (like bass). But to get to -6 LUFS, you sacrifice a lot of dynamic range. All else being equal, the average music consumer judges louder music as better music. Too often music is released with technical issues that degrade the quality. With, choosing a selection results in a full page refresh, press the space key then arrow keys to make a selection. If your target is -1.0dBTP (as is the recommendation for streaming services) but your track is peaking at -0.23dBTP, then you would need to reduce your output by 0.77dB. You don't have to like it. In this article, we cover: Want to improve your mixdowns, but struggling with EQ? This is my personal favourite, mainly because they offer both a free option for producers and engineers who are just getting used to everything, as well as a paid pro option if you need extra detail and want to dive in. Many loudness metering plugins still use RMS, and many DAWs still use it as a metering tool. The result? The problem is, Spotify just turns the volume down. I would recommend reducing a plugin on your master chain that increases gain by this amount (1.7 in this case), such as the gain on your limiter. That’s why I included a recommended -6 to -9 LUFS for DJ stores – just so your tunes hold up in a club. Rory Furr shares 4 steps to using serial compression to boost your mixes without causing clipping or major distortion. Is your track release ready? Why is this? They’re relaible and they’ve been doing it for a long time. To put it simply, 1 LU = 1 dB. Note: The LUFS:dB relationship becomes less consistent as the loudness increases. This means they’re more accurate for real-world application. This way, you get the accurate data of your final master. RMS stands for ‘Root Mean Square’. But it's a reality. But maybe you’re not just struggling with loudness. Often when achieving a loud master, we can sacrifice dynamics range for LUFS. If your master was too quiet with a reading of -20.1 LUFS int, you would need to increase the gain by 6.1dB to hit -14LUFS int. For example, if you’re making a tune at -6 LUFS, Spotify will turn it down to -14 LUFS if their target is so. The measurement for LUFS is ‘Loudness Units’, and the ‘full scale’ refers to the comparison to 0dB being the loudest point along that spectrum before clipping. If you love simple yet fancy GUI’s – this is the one for you. One main way they do this is by targeting the same LUFS level for all music, and adjusting the gain as a result. But before I do, make sure you use these plugins right. Though rather than adjusting the gain, we’re going to adjust the output on the limiter.