Loudness Penalty

[Viktor]

Everyone that masters their own music, has probably already experienced mastering a track too hot for some kind of platform, resulting in the music being turned down a lot. The problem is, it's not very see through which lufs which platform uses at the moment and I've seen a lot of different numbers wandering through gearsultz and other forums and articles. Which makes the mastering process fairly annoying, but luckily today I came across the website  Loudness Penalty which measures your songs for free and displays how many db's they would be turned down. I haven't tried it out first hand and it also would be pretty interesting where they get there data from, could be pretty useful. Since we don't have a mastering section, I'll just posted this in mixing, since it's the closest, I guess?

[kneedeep]

Yes, I've experienced this with youtube several times.

To be honest, I just try to be in the ballpark on the LUFS meter and slightly compress and limit my music, so when youtube turns it down by a couple db it's not the end of the world. After all, it happens to everybody.

My last one was normalized by 14%. That's not too bad. I guess I will just slowly turn it down more for youtube. But doing separate masters for different platforms' LUFS limits (which seem to change all the time), I really can't be arsed to. I doubt those multi-platinum producers do that either. They will turn it down, so what? What matters more is the relative loudness of the piece itself (hence compressing and limiting it). So there isn't a single spike somewhere that makes youtube turn down the entire piece more than necessary.

Master it so it is loud, but not super hot (no brickwall limiter style waveform), and be in the ballpark (-14 to -16 LUFS or so), and let them normalize it by 14% if they think they have to. It happens to all videos. I guess what I mean is do a "good" master rather than worry about LUFS too much. That's just my opinion.

BTW the embedded sound/video player on Google Drive is pretty good sounding, I have used that a couple times to make music available. It is comfortable too if you use Drive for backups etc.

As for where the Loudness Penalty website gets its data from, maybe they regularly check how youtube etc. apply the LUFS limits? I don't know.

Generally I think it's fine if your music gets turned down (because it happens to everybody) but bad if it's too quiet. But I think that has more to do with the actual waveform - a brickwall limited EDM song will still sound louder than an orchestral tune after youtube normalizes both of them. Can't change that.