next »

[zminusone]

I've been trying to figure this out as I've been making a bunch of -14LUFS masters for spotify for an OST I'm working on. Problem is half the tracks are epic boss music, loud and proud. The other half is quiet atmospheric stuff. Does Spotify's loudness normalization destroy the possibility of having dynamics "between" tracks?

My understanding is if your track is above -14LUFS integrated, they turn it down. However, if it's below, they turn it up and potentially limit it! Which is disastrous in some cases. For instance, I was listening to the OST to Aliens a couple months ago and the whole orchestra was ducking with the bass drum... this might've been back when their normalization was louder. But either way...

For me, it feels like volume matching someone screaming and someone whispering with some of this stuff. Well, maybe that's an exaggeration, but has anyone dealt with this before?

-Brian

[Jasmine]

Great video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=101&v=tMGIgJAsJpw

I have no experience with this, although I am thinking of putting my next few projects onto a streaming site. Your comment enticed me to do a bit of diggin. The video above goes a bit in-depth about LUFS and how it is used on different streaming platforms. Essentially (based on that video), track volume is either increased or decreased depending on how close it is to the streaming platform's preferred LUF level. The goal is to keep all tracks in a similar volume range. That being said, I would assume it would hold true for transferrals between pieces.

If you make sure your album is mastered evenly as a whole (and kept to a percieved level), I'm certain it will transfer over into Spotify with little issue, including switching between tracks.

[Xfactor]

Maybe try Bandcamp, I used most of music there for my game. I think they have almost all kind of tracks you could imagine 

[Audiosprite]

Great video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=101&v=tMGIgJAsJpw

I have no experience with this, although I am thinking of putting my next few projects onto a streaming site. Your comment enticed me to do a bit of diggin. The video above goes a bit in-depth about LUFS and how it is used on different streaming platforms. Essentially (based on that video), track volume is either increased or decreased depending on how close it is to the streaming platform's preferred LUF level. The goal is to keep all tracks in a similar volume range. That being said, I would assume it would hold true for transferrals between pieces.

If you make sure your album is mastered evenly as a whole (and kept to a percieved level), I'm certain it will transfer over into Spotify with little issue, including switching between tracks.

thanks for posting the video, have you used the Levels plugin yourself? it certanily looks useful

[zminusone]

@m4uesviecr
That's exactly the problem though I think. In my opinion, it's not ideal to have everything on an album mastered to the same perceived loudness. To me, it would sound odd to have two tracks side by side, one with the entire orchestra playing fortissimo and another featuring a solo cello, both loudness normalized to the same perceived loudness. Correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understand it, this is a potential problem with this system.
 

[Audiosprite]

yeah i definitely see how that's the intuition from a live performance perspective, ime however classical music broadly speaking hasn't adapted to the album format 100% successfully

like, all my classical albums are vastly quieter than the rest, and while it's neat that they retain a lot of the dynamics the composers originally intended in their works i also think it's a problem

orchestral music is a live medium and developed in the spaces it's performed, and albums - two stereo channels - imo should be thought of as basically a different medium. you wouldn't put out a record in any other genre without tasking the mix with actively curating the focus and loudness of the music

just making the very general statement here then i suppose that classical production is imo overly focused on accuracy and not enough on translation