Mastering It Louder Makes It Smaller

The Simple-Fix PDF Engine — Four bucks. It’s the method I used to turn stuff I already knew into PDFs that sell without me standing over them, and half the shelf got built off this same engine. Knowledge rotting in your head does nobody a damn bit of good. This is the fastest honest route out of there and into a file somebody pays for.

New Study Explores Ritual’s Transformative Power — Durkheim claimed a century ago that collective ritual generates a real force that binds people, and nobody could measure it. These researchers finally did, at a carnival in Colombia. The ones hit hardest by the awe came out more willing to help strangers, not just their own. Backwards from how tribalism is supposed to work. Read it if you’ve ever wondered whether the ritual half of magick does any actual work, or whether we’re all just lighting candles.

THE TIP. Here’s a thing that’ll mess with your head if you make music or podcasts: mastering your track louder can make it play back quieter than mine.

Spotify, YouTube, Amazon, Tidal, all of them run loudness normalization now. They measure the whole track in LUFS, integrated across its length, not the peaks, then push it up or down to land near the same target. Around -14, depending. So you slam your master to -6, brickwalled and squashed, and the platform yanks the whole thing right back down.

You don’t get louder. Everybody lands on the same average, that’s the entire point of normalization. What you lose is the peaks. LUFS measures an average, so when Spotify pulls your squashed master down eight dB to hit target, your transients go down with it. The guy who left headroom sits at that same average with his peaks still near the ceiling. His snare hits eight dB harder than yours. Same volume knob.

It’s why a hot mix that sounds huge in the room can come out sounding smaller once it hits Spotify. You’re not imagining it. Took me an embarrassing while to work out I was just crushing the hell out of the one thing normalization would have let me keep.

Check your integrated LUFS before you export. Youlean Loudness Meter has a free version, TBProAudio’s dpMeter is free outright, either tells you in ten seconds.

The loudness war officially ended in 2017, when Spotify pulled its target down to -14 and quit paying for loud. It actually ended in 2008, when Metallica shipped Death Magnetic so brickwalled that fans decided the Guitar Hero version, built for a plastic toy guitar, sounded better than the record they paid for, and petitioned the band to remaster its own album. GZS Radio

Mastering anything this week? Run it through a LUFS meter before you ship and reply with the number. I’ve got a number in my head for where most of ya’ll still are, and I’d love to be wrong about it. ~ J.D.