How to Set Streaming Loudness Levels for Your Masters

Music composed and produced by Sean Divine.

[Itsmesweetmouth]

Ive been finding myself watch more and more of your videos. You keep it short, sweet, simple, straight to the point. Never order loading with info

[VANDYKEDAN]

My first WAVES video, and very pleased with the quality of the content. Simply explained and demonstrated, clear and concise. Perfect. Thank you.

[ROSSNKUNGA]

Sean Divine is a really blessed guy, this guy made some game change on my music in term of Mix and Mastering and all other knowledge. Thanks to waves too for making this happen, help us to reach our goal, making some beautiful plugins :)

This is a win-win situation ☺👊☺

[LilsandazENT]

Dude you are perfect at explaining. This plugin is definitely what I needed. Keep up the great work, bro!

[mauromarionbizzotto]

LUFS or LUKS (Loudness measurement that takes into account the psychoacoustic nature of apparent/perceived loudness):

Long Term/Integrated Loudness = Average loudness measurement calculated over the whole length of an audio event
Short Term Loudness = Loudness measurement calculated over a 3 s (seconds) time frame of an audio event
Momentary Loudness = Loudness measurement calculated over a 400 ms (milliseconds) time frame an audio event

••• Integrated Loudness "sweet spot" at Master Output (LUFS) •••
Between - 16 dbFS (minus 16 dbFS) and - 10 dbFS (minus 10 dbFS) depending on musical style or genre being mastered

Mastering = Audio Normalization
Audio Normalization is the application of a constant amount of gain to an audio recording in order to bring its amplitude to a set target level. As the same amount of gain is applied across the entire audio recording, its signal-to-noise ratio and relative dynamics will remain unchanged/unaltered

[nikoofficialmusic]

Thank you!! This literally has helped A LOT! I usually just open the plug in and watch the long term there. Didn’t know you can tweak and change all the other things 🤣🤦‍♂️

[billygrctv]

Great video sean, After analyzing various songs that sound on the radio and award winners as well, I realized that they are all between -7 to -8. although sometimes there are clients who give me references from -15 to -16.

[MPaz]

simple and straight forward tutorial. well done!

[SantiLawson]

I love deep sound, keep creating..thanks Sean.

[paulEmotionalaudio]

Thanks for posting Sean and very useful video given the technicalities of mixing & mastering for streaming audio. It's important to remember though, LUFS is an AVERAGE measurement across the whole track. So if a lot of your track is quiet and then has one or 2 loud sections the LUFS is not going to be indicative of the whole track. Just something to bear in mind.

[gregmartin]

WLM is a great reference tool! We use it during our church live service broadcast. Because LUFS is measured over the whole broadcast, I can run hotter signals during worship without getting 'penalized' by platforms...we typically run around -12 LUFS for worship, and around -18 for the Lav mics/message. This has produced good results for us.

[Ajonra]

The best thing waves did was get you to create these videos.

[agentcalm]

Great vid. I could never figure out what the terms were on meters. Thanks Sean / Waves

[elisewattmanJackboxGames]

Thank you for this; clear and concise, appreciate you!

[stentorain]

This is an invaluable information. Thanks a million!

[diegorincon]

Could you do a video on your whole mastering chain? specifically your settings on the S1 Imager . Great Video!

[Tedbearbeats]

When I check any reference mix from Youtube/Apple/Spotify most pop top 40 music runs around 7-8 LUFS! why would we want to mix ours to -14?! Am I missing something?

[bboymac]

Wow this looks very straight forward and easy

[EnricoDePaoli]

Great and straight to the point video :) Thank you Sean and Waves.

[michaeholic]

Yesss the true peak limiter on the wlm plus is amazing thank you