"You LUFUS!" - The stupidity of the LUFS-worry infection and how to cure it (scientifically proven!)

You may learned audio engineering online.

You may ran into: "OMG! Streaming services have certain LUFS targets! HEEELP!"

 

"What should we do? They are coming after our tracks! We need to OBEY them. Sure sure, -14LUFS it is...!"

You may have read/watched tutorials about it. You may encountered the site "loudness penalty analyzer" and such.

You may mixed your mix (heh) to -14 LUFS, and you were/are sad your track does not have the same energy, presence and "smack" as the music you love and listen to as a reference.

You read about the all holy True Peak, that pesky politician and population splitting ahole. Seems like, a True Peak of over -1db is a true crime! At least when you believe the interweb.

You may started to get desperate about it (like I did) and ask: How can it be that those people make their tracks and videos sooou loud and full of energy, yet mine are soo freaking low and energy freE ?

You may have encountered, like me, only later in your journey the power and central role of Compressors and how they are single-handedly responsible for making things loud and present not only on the master for the whole, but also on individual instruments and tracks.

You know and encountered all this. And you think you are doomed to never be able to mix something as smacking and present as the things you adore. 

You use that infamous Youlean Loudness Meter plugin. Exactly mix your integrated LFS to -14, then, timidly you mix to -12... still, to no avail. That track you compare to, it is still seemingly louder.

Then one day it struck you...

Since we live in a DAW time, you drag drop your favorite loud track into your DAW, observing its waveform. After all, this way, you can finally see, WITH YOUR OWN EYES, what their waveform looks like compared to yours, AND, you can use that glorious Youlean Loudness Meter to measure their values.

You do that, and B O O M ... your jaw drops onto the table...

WHAT in the .... 

They told you the following (imagine as cartoon voice):

• NEVER ever mix above your target platforms' LUFS , or you will SUFFER for it 
• NEVER have your True Peak exceed -1db, or you will SUFFER for it
• Never this never that

You know what kind of people say things like that... :X 

Turns out, this is all utter and complete bullshit.

The simple thing about the streaming services BUTCHERING your tracks is just that they have their own in house limiting and ass-compression, WHICH YOU CAN NOT BYPASS ANYWAYS.

It does not matter how loud your initial music is. YT and the likes will simply push it down to THEIR (arbitrary) standards. Why would you butcher your music in the name of unavoidable monopoly corporations who think homogenizing their loudness levels is not fascism. (Why do you think they do NOT apply loudness normalization to their ads, but only to the content? hah? Think about it next time when an ad blasts your ears. Think about how much YT cares about your art)

Let me tell you after truly suffering not from what they told me I would suffer from, but listening to what they told me being the origin of what I suffered from in the first place. And that was, again, the internet being full of misinformation, and claims about the "right" and "correct" and "one size fits all" way of doing things.

You CAN NOT HAVE your tracks full of spice and energy when you mix them to a dead -14lufs. This is not practical. The lack of energy will perfectly translate to your track after upload.

So, mixing your music to a certain low LUFS threshold is like having someone tailor your painting not to exceed a certain amount of value contrast, or, someone saying you are not allowed to sing as loud as you want, etc. 

It makes zero sense. Don't believe me? Just analyze any powerful and smacking sounding track you love (I buy mine as WAVs on bandcamp), and observe HOW PROFESSIONAL AUDIO ENGINEERS CONFIDENTLY AND BLATANTLY VIOLATE any of those "made up by internet kids" and "bitter mid-olds forum guys" ' rules about mixing and mastering. And you probably start to ask: Why the f am I told these things as if they were ultimate truths? When professional engineers and most self produced musicians do not give a damn?

They well exceed a True Peak of -1db, with their TP sitting often around -0.3 to -0.1. Their LUFS often times sit around -10LUFS to even -8LUFS or even outside of that. They tailor their values to their ears and to the needs of the genre and the particular track.

I wish someone would have given me the "do not fall for the LUFS True Peak nonsense trap" slap

Just do it. Take any loud track that you love. Inspect it, and you will see they are NOT mixed at -14LUFS or a TP of -1DB. 

 

It is idiotic, because why would we mix music to a target of something that was born out of streaming platforms' needs? Especially since there are platforms which let you host uncompressed, un-normalized WAVs, which I feel everybody should rather be on (called bandcamp, cough).

Why would it even matter? If all the target platform does is to cut down your loudness to their own ARBITRARY target anyways, no  matter what you do. And when you're under it, it won't raise it. Or, raise it for you, potentially making things worse.

So, why not mix music to the loudness you want/need/is conform with your reference tracks? As long as there is no distortion/going into red (I remember the rule of thumb: "Get distortion, go to jail". Paradoxically, in this one "rule" or "threat" I believe, as this one actually makes sense to me). And, if your tracks get cut down anyways, why rob your tracks of their energy?

For me, this was the one thing that completely held me back on my journey, until I said fuxx it! And just started taking my reference tracks as... reference, instead of relying on military numbers. I learned so much by doing that and inspecting their waveforms that no reading online in some circle jerky forums did ever teach me. After all, those people who made the ref tracks you chose, actually are who made the music you love.

Often, when "religious numbers people" are being asked what the problem would be with non -14LUFS and non -1TP, reasoning to them that the streaming platform just cuts down the loudness, and that's it, they say: "It potentially CAN introduce clipping and distortion, if the streaming platform would lower it... due to you not hitting the target."

Yet, when you read most professional's comments about it, most of them, either on forums, articles or YT, say that it does not matter.

To me, the obsession with LUFS and True Peak in inet audio world is similar to the 3d game art inet communities nonsensical over-obession with "proper" topology, whatever the heck that means no one seems to be able to clearly define... and is rather heavily reliant on a lot of different, project and art style specific factors. In the end, it's all triangles (or in this case frequencies) anyways.

So if you read this, stumbled upon this due to falling into the inet nerd trap telling you how you need to aim for any fixed fantasy numbers of giant tech corps dictating you how loud you should mix your music, I hope I could spare you some pain. Screw them! And mix to reference using your ears and your loudness meter, and not towards what some company tells you to do to fit their platform. That is their problem. Not yours.  I def do not make it mine anymore.

Thanks for letting me be part of your reality. Log ends here, continues elsewhere.

Further read.

Online drag n drop LUFs analyzer (There are other sites as well, but I like this one. Not sure if I should be worried uploading there though... ai and stuff. But looks safe from their policy on their github. Use at your own risk.)

Bonus tip: Right click on any Youtube video -> Stats for Nerds, to see how much normalization was applied. "100/100" and (content loudness -4db) means the track was lower than YT's expected levels by 40 percent. "100/60" and (content loudness 4db) will tell you it was normalized down by 4db, as it was exceeding by 4db.