Mastering for Spotify® and Other Streaming Services | Are You Listening? | S2 Ep4

#areyoulistening #izotope #audiomastering #ozone

What’s so different about mastering for a streaming service? Follow along as professional mastering engineer and iZotope Education Director Jonathan Wyner teaches you the two main differentiators between mastering for streaming services and mastering for other formats: level and loudness.

[iZotopeOfficial]

Have a question for Jonathan? Reply below and we’ll address it in a future episode of Are You Listening!

[greggawhite]

I master professionally and also have worked along side other top grammy-winning mastering engineers. NONE of them master at -14. You just need to make your master sound awesome and competitive. That usually means between -7 and -10 LUFS depending on the the artist and genre. In my experience -8 LUFS is really a sweet spot IF you can get there intelligently. Intelligently usually means using a combination of high quality saturation, light compression, EQ, selective peak editing, gentle stages of limiting, and discreet multi band compression or dynamic eq. Give yourself a little breathing room for the peaks...Around -0.5 on the output works just fine. One of the top mastering guys I have worked with outputs at 0.0 and told me he NEVER goes below -0.3 on the output setting. Once your master sounds amazing, print and send to the client. It will sound amazing everywhere. If not, that's someone else's fault.

[aatagila]

I've actually experimented with loudness on streaming services particularly Spotify. I released two tracks one mastered at -14 LUFS and other at -9 LUFS and I found that the -14 LUFS track DID NOT get through normalisation and sounded very soft in comparison to the second track. Whereas the -9 LUFS was slightly normalised but still sounded great! So if you're going -14 or -12 it is probably NOT going to sound good or loud!

[KeithHutchinsonYT]

Hi Jonathan, at 6.00 you adjusted the threshold to 8.5dB, why? Surely that will affect the final level and you made no mention of just trying to understand. Thx

[LarryGreenMusic]

I use an aggregator, CD Baby, to release my music for streaming and for purchase. I can only submit one file, 44100Khz - 16 Bit wave file, for each release. I use Ozone 8 for mastering and use the master assistant set to CD High, I then set the maximizer threshold to -1.0 dB and the loudness to -10 LUFS. It seems to work for all the services that I can check (I don't have accounts on all the streaming services) but I'm wondering if there is a better way to make one file work for all!

[JOVANNEMUSIC]

Great video..!! .i did a master beofre with a -9.00 LUFS CD level and Spotify of course loweered the volume....my question is: Do I always have to semd it -13 dbm for streaming?? I dod it before amd still lowerr the volume so how can we put a song that sounds realy good in Spotify???? Thanks 👍🔥🔥🔥

[JAMStudiosIE]

Is there any known test on Spotify or other streaming service where we can hear -14 vs -8 and be able to compare to itself and other songs. Ideally multiple songs and genres. If not - there’s a project!

[NeologicStudios]

I've noticed a trend in loudness and mastering for different genres, and I'm curious if you could dive into the topic more. The traditional role of a mastering engineer is to be transparent and do no harm, eg: when the ME has done their job well, you (or the audience) won't "know we exist".

However, with the rise of EDM I'm especially noticing the desire of edm artists and producers treating mastering as a final sound design/mixing element. I've noticed this particular approach bleed into other genres like post-rock and metal with certain acts/groups, and am curious what your take is on this newer approach (though I can point back to records as far back as the late 90's that were pushing loudness practices that were utilizing similar approaches).

[ioannisandriotis]

Hello Jonathan, great series of tutorials. We all appreciate the clear instructions and well-organized thought process behind everything you say. 

My question is: 
I am really struggling with getting good competitive results during "mastering" for tracks that are utilizing a lot of not "so great" virtual instruments. I do understand what's going on here and the nature of the problem (sound source), but does your approach to low end treatment change between virtual instruments vs actual acoustic instrument recordings? Also, in this kind of scenarios how to you talk to the client and make them understand that there are limitations to what you can actually improve? Looking for emotional, physical, and technical points of view if you could please take a moment to share your thoughts on the point of discussion.

Thanks in advance and all the best,  

Ioannis

[bboymac]

Cant get enough of this show!! Bring on the knowledge Johnathan!

[interesao]

Thanks for this amazingly free content iZotope! I'd like to ask if it's necessary to use the dither option on the Maximizer as part of the final plugin in our chain in order to export to 24 bit. Are there any benefits? Thanks!

[CliffHillis]

Love that they used the White Reaper tune as the audio!

[allyhellkiller]

Master for all pllatforms.And make it sound good on phones.

[aevinne]

How to chahge the System sound of my PC though the Ozone? like APO Equalizer

[petervogl]

I think what would benefit a lot of folks is you to take songs you have mastered from different genres and show them using insight 2. Explain what your fundamental thinking was for your level and treatment. That way we're not talking about general recommendations for levels etc. but a process that would certainly help a lot of us. What caused one tune to be "louder" than another...what was your general thinking on how much to limit or compress certain styles of songs...

[devstation]

Great video answers the question why streamed music sounds lifeless if played normally usinf natuve dac of device

[dekemerrell]

May find some way to trick the level tampering Bots used by streaming service into not tampering with the masters. Some kind of front end or decoy in a plug in or app maybe?

[clavernanti]

Hi guys,
The thing is that I measure loudness from youtube music through Youlean for some major songs, every single one is a lot above -14 lufs integrated, with true peak well above -1. Usually I measured around -9 lufs and +0.5 (and above to +1) true peak. How does this explained according to spotify/youtube loudness policies?
I'm pretty sure about my measurements that I did with different methods (streaming, downloading, ...) on major hits.
Cheers
C.

[HitTheRoadMusicStudio]

Where's the Cat Shirt ? :D Another fantastic episode, thank you Jonathan and Izotope !

[CubaseAcademy]

This might get lost in the many comments, but my question is, what happens with "back catalog" and older recordings? Are they all being remastered for streaming, or just encoded as-is? Anyone know?