The most important thing about the Loudness Penalty isn’t really the number.

It’s how the music might sound as a result of that number, in comparison to everything else. The most powerful strategy is to listen to your music in context, with matched loudness – which is how it'll be heard most often online.

That's why we made Loudness Penalty Studio.

It's a brand new desktop application for Mac & PC, designed to quickly and easily allow you to see the loudness stats of a whole album or playlist at a glance – including the Loudness Penalty values – and more importantly to hear their effect.

If you listen to your music at matched loudness with your favourite references and it still sounds great, there is no penalty. But if the LP value is large and negative, and you feel as if it could have space, snap, depth and life to it – often a master with more balanced dynamics will help.

It's an easy test to do - just fire up an LUFS meter, measure the songs you want to compare with, do some simple arithmetic and adjust them all to the same LUFS value...

It's pretty tiresome, though ! Especially if you have a different set of references for different genres, or artists, and want to often swap files out. And as always, the devil's in the details. YouTube doesn't turn quiet songs up, Apple has a different Distribution Loudness level, TIDAL always uses album mode and so on... it can feel overwhelming trying to keep track of everything.

Whereas with Loudness Penalty Studio, you can just drag, drop & Preview. Create multiple custom playlists, save them and swap them around, add and remove files, and loudness match with a single click. It's become my default music player, at this point !

So if that sounds interesting, take a look at the video above, and give it a try.

I hope you like it – we have all kinds of ideas to make it even more useful, if people like it – let me know what you think !