Short Term (2) and Momentary Max (4) (taken over 3s and 400ms respectively) show immediate trends of loudness in your audio and could indicate problematic areas. This dynamic track has sections that go above and below the target level, but the average loudness remains the same. If things are sounding too quiet in your studio, turn up your monitors not your mix! You should also consider calibrating your studio monitors so that you have a known, fixed reference level while you work – įinally, while it’s good practice to keep an eye on your meters while mixing, ears and music come first, so don’t forget to listen! Other Numbers A recording with a high (True) Peak-to-Loudness ratio (PLR) is often perceived as clearer and less fatiguing than one that has been excessively peak-limited. It is counterintuitive at first, but at these levels you are opening up serious headroom for your peaks, and this affects perceived signal quality. Notes on MonitoringĬompared to old school “mastered-to-0.1dB-peaks” and RMS levels between -12 to - 6 dB (depending on material), mixing around -24 LUFS can seem a tad low. Sample peak targets are obsolete, traditional peak-sample meters cannot measure intersample (true) peaks which can lead to problems further down the line when converting audio to lossy formats like MP3. RMS does not take into account the psychoacoustic nature of apparent loudness as heard by the human ear, but the Integrated loudness measurement specifically does.įurthermore some RMS meters average rather than sum input giving you an inaccurate reading of up to -3 dB or more.
How you gain stage before loudness normalisation is entirely up to you, but mixing to around -23 LUFS is good practice. Wait, why not mix with familiar peak and RMS readings, and loudness normalise at the end? On the surface a -23 LUFS pink noise signal measures just shy of -23 dB RMS, but two music tracks measuring the same RMS values may not necessarily have the same perceived loudness. Gain Staging and Issues with RMS and Peak Measurements It will not fix frequency issues or balance issues – a weak mix will remain weak, and over-compressed, brick-wall-limited audio will simply be turned down. Remember, Loudness normalisation does not replace mixing and mastering. 16 LUFS should still be your final target though, and have the DJs level match via gain on the mixer in the club. For example, Richie Hawtin’s “From my mind to yours” (2015) seems to hover around -10 LUFS per track, Claude Van Stroke on Dirty Bird is a whopping - 6 LUFS per track, and Deadmau5’s seminal track “Strobe” is a surprisingly conservative -12 LUFS. So if - 23 LUFS is too soft, - 9 LUFS is too loud, and -12 LUFS is outside of the AES recommendations, what should we aim for with dance music? Target Levels for EDMĬlub land is still the wild west when it comes to loudness unfortunately. It will get turned down, converted along the way, and possibly hit limiters (of questionable fidelity) on those systems, further degrading your sound. Crucially, it is more beneficial to have a dynamic track turned up than to have a loud, compressed track turned down, so mixing and mastering to -9 LUFS for online audio is not a great idea. So, why is this an issue? Streaming through, or from, a mobile device is how most of your audience will engage with your music outside of Live/DJ sets, so optimising for streaming makes sense.
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This is because current portable media devices (especially those adhering to European regulations) do not have sufficient gain to hear these levels in day to day situations like commuting. First, - 23 LUFS falls below the AES recommended minimum target level of -20 LUFS for streaming. There are two issues with these targets for modern music makers.
Target Loudness depends on the destination platform. A target loudness of -12 to -9 LUFS would bring you up to traditional CD levels, but -9 LUFS kind of defeats the point of caring about levels, and -12 LUFS is arguably still too loud.Īs we shall see, there are technical reasons for aiming lower than these two targets.
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