LUFS

There's one option where you can just have a great big cross if it comes up, if you've gone over your dynamic range threshold, which you might set to zero or minus 1 dB.

I don't find that one particularly helpful because it doesn't tell you how much, but there are other meters that tell you exactly how much you're going over your true peak or your true peak target or your LUFS target.

All of these things enable you to target your gain staging for a consistent result across all your mixers and masters.

which is going to help with translation.

Like VU meters don't pick up every fast, quick transient.

So I like to have a VU meter.

where I can and the good thing is in let me see MV Meter 2 which is free from TB Pro Audio and the VU Meter in Studio One you can calibrate them so like you know 0 VU could be minus 16 minus 12 minus 18 so if you're somebody like Ed that likes to go in at minus 12 max peak again that's really good because then you could set 0 VU to minus 12 so you could always see kind of roughly where it's hitting in the analog domain but look people are going to get so so so fucking bored with meter and plugins but I think the last one I would say that is really important and is the reason why we use Decibel from Process Audio is because it's got an ongoing LUFS meter and for me it's really important when I'm doing a mix because it is very easy to get lost and there's some times where you're like yeah this is fucking great it's slamming you're like holy fuck it's minus six how the fuck did I get there And then, and it's that little thing to go, oh, okay, maybe I actually, maybe I've been mixing a bit too long.

And then what I'll do is I'll take a break for five minutes and then I'll come back and then I'll do ABs and I'll be like, okay, no, I've overdone it.

This is a term you may or may not have heard before.

It's the word LUFS, L-U-F-S.

And LUFS is a measurement used to describe perceived loudness.

It stands for loudness units relative to full scale.

It's a measurement of how loud audio sounds to the human ear over time, rather than just simply measuring the highest peak in your audio file.

So LUFS is not measuring how loud is this episode.

Instead, it's trying to measure how loud the audio sounds to us as the listener.

This matters because you don't want your listeners constantly reaching for the volume button.

They have a standard of what it has to be.

Like Spotify's negative 14 LUFS and Apple's negative 16 LUFS.

So if you really want to be in the middle, just put it in negative 15 and you're fine.

But they're setting a standard.

So after the show, you know, I mix it, I put it through Auphonic, and that'll bring it up.

I use 16.

That's just what I've used from the very beginning, so negative 16 LUFS.

So you're pleasing Apple.

We get into the tiny EQ moves that get masters approved or rejected, moves that nobody else can even hear.

She shares her LUFS targets and an honest take on the loud reference epidemic.

She opens up about burning out on an insane schedule, the fibromyalgia that followed, and the therapy that led her to a real sense of balance.

We also talk about what it's like trading Sterling's tight-knit East Coast culture for LA's more open one.

I basically try to...

I try to because sometimes just the mix doesn't allow that, just in the sense of how loud we get some mixes.

But for me, ideally, staying around minus eight LUFS is a good idea to have a good master in the sense that it will translate good in streaming, but also if people turn off the normalization, it's at a good level.

So that's around where I like to be, minus eight, minus six.

Now I'm curious enough to go listen to it and see if I can use it.

People out there, forget about LUFS.

Forget about bus compressors to the max so that you get a brick wall.

You are maybe impressing.

If you have the building blocks of the understanding of how to get things to work on many different systems and pay attention to the technicalities, and this is something I've rabbit-holed this week with Christoph.

He's been like, right, well, you know, YouTube's got to be this LUFS and you've got to have minus... one db of true peak and for this vinyl you want to do x y and z i've been picking his brains fascinated like oh wow okay so like you know what how does this affect that and you know etc and it's those things that enable you to elevate your skill set to be more valuable to other people just belligerently saying yeah i don't need to know how to do this It's so narrow-minded.

It's not helping anyone, yourself mostly, move forward.

But in terms of longevity, as Paul said with the house, he wants that to last at least another 100 years.

... and good punch.

And so I took some stereo objects that were kind of close to the center and put them out more towards the left and right, because the way that the, the LUFS integrated measurement algorithm works, y- you, you can ...

Y- I didn't really change the mix, because I, I moved things that were here to here, so perceptibly they were still-

I see

But i- with Atmos, do you, do you find that there, there's, there's, uh, this need to, to push the, the, the limit of, like, how loud everything is? Or do you find that people are a l- a little bit more dynamic?

Well, interesting.

Th- there are different levels to Atmos releases, but in a hard, scientific, measurable sense, minus 18 integrated LUFS is the delivery limit.

So there, there is actually a dynamic limit to the format.

The measure is called loudness, integrated loudness, specifically meaning the average level across the whole piece rather than the height of its tallest peak.

And it is written in LUFS, loudness units relative to full scale.

It is always a negative number and closer to zero means louder.

YouTube's target is minus 14 LUFS with true peaks kept under minus one.

Short form feeds like TikTok and Reels normalize into roughly the same neighborhood around minus 14 to minus 12 under the same one decibel peak ceiling.

And mobile first masters are commonly pushed a little hotter than that.

A multi-model stack that pairs a QEN38B-derived global LLM for long-range song structure with a residual codebook detail model and a retrained Minimex vocoder, producing 44.1 KHz stereo in one continuous pass, then hands-back real production tools.

DMUX stem separation, pitch-tracked editable MIDI, and LUFS mastering, gated behind an OAuth session because they operate on saved work you own.