Video Transcript:
My friends today we are going to talk about how to prepare your music for delivery to Spotify, Youtube and the other guys using Decibel.
It is now a well-known concept, streaming platforms are aligning all their music at the same LUFS.
Not across platforms within their own platform we do that.
So we got to give it to them it's got two noticeable advantages. Number one it prevents you from having to adjust levels yourself and keep reaching for that volume knob while you listen to your favorite playlists, right everything feels more or less the same.
Number two most services chose a rather reasonable level -14 db LUFS for Spotify for example. Thus helping us towards an end to the loudness war, yay so for those of you tracks that are going to end up on the web there is no point in compressing them to death anymore, because you have like say 14 dbs of headroom to play with and that's really nice, just like the old days i guess but you have to know how to manage this new opportunity, know what to do with it, and know its impact.
So we know that the string platforms will do one of two things to your music.
If your track is louder than their spec they will bring it down by turning down its volume very simple. That's what happens to most tracks these days, if your track is not loud enough they will turn it up and probably compress it and limit it thereby touching your stuff and no one knows what they really do.
Decibel can help you avoid all that grief; this is an example of a Spotify delivery preset for decibel. You can see that the target in the middle there in the super meter is -14 that's the target LUFS integrated level, and then for Spotify your target true peak is -1 and you can see it there on the bottom right. So now i'm going to run music through it and we're gonna see go as you can see right now true peak is really happy we're very very far away from -1 and LUFS integrated is about 130 dbs away from joy so let's press play.
[Music]
Union music so i can talk to you.
Now as you can see he re the super meter gives you the information.
It tells you that our intro is at -18 LUFS is short term and that you can see the on the inner track you can see the integrated raising. You can see that the true pix's happy because we're really far away from -1. Cool and you can see that LUFS is unhappy because we're not within the range around -14 that is considered viable and healthy for you to be in the thread of the current tracks on Spotify, but as the track progresses up we're now within the range the target just turned blue, because blue is the color that the default decibel skin chooses if you want to make it red you can we are within 2 dbs of 14 -14 and thus this is acceptable.
If i stop right now you can tell that the LUFS is at -14.5 thus Spotify would raise it at half db but as i let the whole track play you can see it's probably going to exceed that and so this track's probably going to get brought down by Spotify a little bit, and that's that's okay that happens a lot but at least you're not far away from your target which is the whole point of going through this exercise you know where you stand. The tracks finish playing decibel analyze all of it and we see that our final LUFS integrated level is -13, you can see it right here and that is within one db of what we consider a pass a good and then our true peak is 0.2 db away from the allowed maximum.
So we're happy we happy campers i can change those things if i want to if i say okay -13 is too loud i don't want Spotify to ever bring my music down i can go to calibration and i can change here i can say okay there's no way i want this to be 0.1 and that's it that means that unless i'm hitting exactly 14 db then disability is going to fail me.
And this my friends concludes our segment on how to optimize your music for Spotify youtube and the other guys.