There were several factors that led to me putting my foot in my mouth last week – or, my keyboard, perhaps that should be – in a post where I incorrectly announced that Spotify’s “Volume Normalisation” feature makes everything sound terrible (It doesn’t)
This post describes my mistakes, and contains some words of caution for anyone trying to decide if one thing sounds better than another. First I’ll tell you the factors that lead to my wrong conclusions, then I’ll explain how they tripped me up.
This post ended up as a bit of a mess – if you read on you’ll see what I mean ! To find out why, read the next one.
I’m leaving it here because there are some sites linking in, and some people will find it useful, but if you really want to know what I think about Spotify and the Loudness Wars, please read my guest post on RecordProduction.com instead:
Update – I wrote this post a few years ago now, and the TT meter is no longer the only kid on the block – although it’s still a great choice. To see a new video round-up of some currently available dynamic range meters, click here.
Loudness has always been an important topic in mixing, and especially mastering – never more so than today.
Knowing how loud is too loud has always been difficult. I’ve written before about how we hear loudness, and different software solutions for measuring loudness - but now, everything has been made far easier.
Recently a new tool has been released, purpose-designed for measuring the loudness of music. You can now see at a glance how loud your mix is, make informed decisions about compression and limiting, and choose to make your recordings punchy, loud and competitive.
And best of all – it’s free. (*)
(*) Kind of
This tool is the TT Dynamic Range Meter, released by the Pleasurize Music Foundation. It comes in two flavours – the one in the animation on the right is the real-time plugin version, available for both Mac and PC now, in AU, RTAS and VST versions.
There is also a second, off-line version of the meter, which generates an overall DR dynamic range measurement for a complete WAV file or CD and allows you to generate a log file, which can be submitted to the (unofficial) Dynamic Range Database.
The real-time plugin version shows peak and RMS level metering for the left and right channels, but also a measurement of the dynamic range – the difference between the loudest and quietest parts of the music – in the centre, labelled “DR“.
Broadly speaking, the idea is to keep the dynamic range as wide as possible – up to a point, at least. Click to continue »
"Everything you have advised us on has been invaluable... We learnt a hell of a lot from those two emails. We will absolutely be in touch regarding future mixes"
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