If you’re a musician mixing and mastering your own songs you could be ruining them before you even release them. If you want strong masters that sound their very best read on…

What Was The Loudness War?

For many years, engineers had been finding ways to maximise the level of their masters based on the fact that music can sound better when it’s louder, and back in the days of CD, cassettes and vinyl, it made sense to make sure your master was at least as loud as everyone else’s. 

Those days are long gone. As we all know, nine times out of ten your listeners’ primary platform is going to be a streaming service or download, with the occasional physical release to give the ‘bespoke experience’ fans something to have and hold.

If you are producing your own music at home, you could be inadvertently ruining the sound of your blood sweat and tears by making your masters louder than they need to be.

Loud Makes Quiet

In the age of streaming, making your music loud compared to moderately mastered music might actually make it sound quieter, and even worse, distorted. How?

• Loud masters actually get turned down by streaming services to make them as quiet as moderately mastered music. The listener always decides loudness.

• The limiting plugins used on home masters can only make music loud by flattening the tops of the peaks. This sounds like distortion because it is distortion.

• When your mastered files are converted into other formats by streaming services, ‘hot’ masters can have further distortion introduced by the format, or “codec” used by them.

Making your music unnecessarily loud kills quality and, paradoxically, can make it sound quieter than other people’s.

How Loud Is Loud?

Loudness is simply our perception of it. In the context of any mix, it’s about knowing the loudness standard for the platform(s) that your music is going to. It’s based upon several factors, including level, frequency, and other factors over time, which can be measured and managed. For a detailed explanation of loudness, you can read Mike Thornton’s detailed article on this subject. 

Nugen Audio ISL True Peak Limiter

True peak limiters allow engineers to avoid clipping either in the DAW, or following upload and conversion for streaming. Not only that, but they also ensure against analogue overs at the listener’s end (this is the “true peak” part of their operation). They are also used to set loudness by controlling the amount of limiting applied.

ISL is Nugen’s professional true peak limiter plugin that allows you to adjust limiting  for the final delivery platform. It has several high end features that set it apart from many DAWs’ stock limiter plugins that are well worth exploring. Here are some of the things ISL can do that many stock plugins cannot:

• Manage steering and ducking. The Channel Link amount can be adjusted to manage steering caused by interchannel level differences from unlinked limiting (that’s stereo image shift if you’re a music mixer). It can also stop ducking caused by global limiting across all channels from linked limiting (this can cause surround channels to be ducked by centre channel limiting and vice versa in film and TV mixes).

• Avoid distortion at low frequencies. Fast release times on a limiter can be handy when protecting against very fast transients, but fast release times can also cause low-end distortion when the release is quick enough to ‘track’ the audio waveform itself. ISL’s Auto Release monitors low frequency content and extends the hold time accordingly.

• Avoids overs caused by dithering. By its nature, dither has to happen after limiting. ISL applies power compensation to its True Peak output to avoid dither-related clips after the limiter. You can learn more about dither in Paul Maunder’s article.  

• Improves accuracy with two selectable algorithms: ITU-R B.S. 1770 true-peak algorithm or the afclip algorithm as specified in the Apple Mastered for iTunes format. 

Nugen Audio MasterCheck

Measuring the loudness of your master following limiting is an essential stage of preparing your music for streaming or distribution. Not only will the target platform (be it a music streaming service, radio or TV) have a loudness requirement for your music, but it will also use any one of a number of different digital processes (known as codecs) to make the files more efficient for streaming. MasterCheck has a number of advanced tools for measuring and evaluating your masters prior to delivery.

• Internationally recognised loudness measurements, dynamics monitoring and ITU compliant true-peak inter-sample metering. The interface allows you to select presets with target loudness values for different platforms and measure your loudness against them. In some cases, it’s as easy as clicking the Offset To Match button for instant compliant loudness for your track.

• Comprehensive referencing to existing material in the context of fully exploiting the available headroom in a loudness normalised environment. With the pack’s included Send plugin, references can be auditioned and measured directly in the plugin. This is very elegant in use and has better workflow compared to solo’ing references in the DAW. 

• Codec auditioning tools revealing data compression artifacts and true peak overs. You can monitor different codecs organised into groups that are particular to the platform you’re delivering to. Users can hear the codecs in context, or just their artifacts in Difference mode.

Final Thoughts

Although mastering at home has never been easier, it’s also never been easier to seriously damage the audio quality of your hard-earned work by making it over-loud. Using the tools in the Producer pack from Nugen Audio will allow you to make your music as loud as anything else out there, and cleaner sounding than the rest as a result. Not that it’s a competition; the loudness war is over.

Head over to Nugen Audio to check out Producer Pack now.