Audio Loudness: LUFS, True Peak and Why Your Track Gets Turned Down
Every streaming platform plays everything at the same loudness, so a crushed master gains nothing and loses its dynamics. The targets that matter in 2026 and how to hit them.
Updated August 26, 20267 min read
For twenty years, making a record louder than the competition was a real advantage, and the resulting arms race flattened popular music into a solid block of sound. That advantage no longer exists. Every major streaming service now plays everything back at a common loudness, which means a master crushed to be loud is simply turned down to match everything else — and all you are left with is the damage.
Peak, RMS and LUFS are three different questions
Confusion about loudness usually comes from mixing up three measurements that answer different questions. Peak asks how high the highest single sample goes, which matters for clipping and nothing else. RMS asks about average energy over time, which is closer to perceived loudness but treats a bass rumble and a cymbal as equally loud. LUFS asks how loud it actually sounds to a person, weighting frequencies the way human hearing does.
| Measure | Written as | Answers |
|---|---|---|
| Sample peak | dBFS | Will it clip? |
| True peak | dBTP | Will it clip after conversion to MP3 or AAC? |
| RMS | dB RMS | How much average energy is there? |
| Integrated loudness | LUFS | How loud does the whole thing sound? |
| Loudness range | LU | How much does it vary between quiet and loud parts? |
The distinction between sample peak and true peak is the one that catches people out. A digital file is a series of samples, and the actual waveform passes between them — so a signal that never exceeds 0 dBFS at any sample can still exceed it between samples once reconstructed. Lossy encoders make this worse. A file that measures safely at 0 dBFS can clip audibly after being converted to MP3, which is why every platform asks for headroom below zero rather than at it.
The targets that matter
Music and video services cluster around −14 LUFS, with Apple Music slightly quieter at −16, and spoken-word conventions sitting at −16 for podcasts. Broadcast is different again, because it was standardised earlier and for a different listening environment.
| Destination | Integrated loudness | True peak ceiling |
|---|---|---|
| Spotify, YouTube, Tidal, Amazon Music | −14 LUFS (YouTube: about −14, measured rather than published) | −1 dBTP (Amazon Music: −2 dBTP) |
| Apple Music | −16 LUFS | −1 dBTP |
| Apple Podcasts | −16 LUFS (±1) | −1 dBTP |
| Spotify podcasts | −14 LUFS | −1 dBTP |
| Broadcast television (EBU R128) | −23 LUFS | −1 dBTP |
| Audiobooks (ACX, for Audible) | −23 to −18 dB RMS (not LUFS) | −3 dBFS peak; noise floor below −60 dB RMS |
| Video for a website, no normalisation | −16 LUFS | −1 dBTP |
How the platforms use those numbers differs, and it matters. All of them turn loud material down. Not all of them turn quiet material up — as of 2026, YouTube and, by most measurements, Tidal leave a quiet master quiet; Apple does not document whether Sound Check raises one; and Spotify does raise it, applying its own limiter in the process if the listener has chosen the loud playback setting. Neither outcome is good: too loud and you gave away your dynamics for nothing, too quiet and your track sounds weak next to the next one, or gets processed by an algorithm you cannot hear in advance.
Measuring before you change anything
Normalisation without measurement is guesswork, and the numbers are frequently not what people expect — home recordings of speech commonly land around −30 LUFS, quiet enough that listeners reach for the volume control and are then startled by the next thing they play.
Measure the whole file, not a section
Integrated loudness is a measurement over the entire programme. The loudness meter reports it along with true peak and loudness range, which together tell you what kind of adjustment you need.
Check the loudness range before normalising
A range under about 4 LU means the material is already heavily compressed and normalising is purely a level change. Above roughly 12 LU on spoken word means the quiet parts will be inaudible in a car or on a train no matter what the average says.
Even out the performance if the range is wide
Level differences within a recording are a job for dynamic range compression — the Dynamic range setting in the audio compressor, or the normaliser's “Even out the recording” leveller (both Pro) — not normalisation. Normalising moves everything by the same amount; it never fixes a quiet passage relative to a loud one.
Normalise to the target
Set the destination's number in the normaliser and let it calculate the gain. Doing this by ear against a reference track is the traditional method and is far less accurate than a measurement.
Verify the true peak afterwards
Raising loudness raises peaks. Measure again after normalising and confirm you are still under −1 dBTP, particularly if the file is destined for MP3 or AAC.
Hit an exact LUFS target with a safe true-peak ceiling — measured and applied on your device, with no upload.
Normalise a trackLoudness across an album or a series
Normalising every track to exactly the same number is right for a podcast series and wrong for an album. Episodes are heard in isolation, weeks apart, often in a car — consistency between them is the whole point, and there is no artistic argument for one episode being quieter.
An album is heard as a sequence, and the relationships between tracks are part of the work. A quiet interlude before a loud closer is a deliberate effect that per-track normalisation destroys. The professional approach is to normalise the album as a single programme and preserve the relative levels within it, which is also what the streaming services do when a listener enables album mode.
- Podcast series: normalise every episode to the same target independently. Consistency wins.
- Album: measure and set the level once across the whole record, keeping the internal balance.
- Video project: normalise dialogue to the target, then set music and effects relative to it by ear.
- Compilation or playlist: per-track normalisation, since the tracks have no relationship to each other.
- Audiobook: per-chapter to the same target, with a wider peak ceiling than music platforms ask for.
What normalisation cannot do
It is a gain change, calculated intelligently. That means it cannot fix a recording that was captured too quietly, because raising the signal raises the noise floor with it — a recording made at −45 dB comes up to target with an audible hiss that was always there and was simply too quiet to notice. It cannot repair clipping that has already been recorded in, since the tops of those waveforms no longer exist. It cannot balance two speakers on separate microphones, which needs each track handled separately before mixing.
And it will not make a thin mix sound full. Loudness and richness are different properties, and the temptation when a track sounds weak is to push it louder, which in the streaming era achieves precisely nothing — the platform undoes it on the way to the listener. What actually helps is arrangement and balance, decided before the loudness stage exists.
All of the measurement and processing described here runs on your own device, not our servers. For unreleased music, client work and recordings under an embargo, that matters practically: there is no copy on a server, no processing queue and no retention window — and a long album master starts processing immediately instead of after a transfer. The free plan takes one file up to 50 MB and 15 minutes; Pro removes the size and length caps and takes up to 25 files at once.
Frequently asked questions
What LUFS should I master to?
Around −14 LUFS with a true peak ceiling of −1 dBTP covers almost everything. Spotify, YouTube, Tidal and Amazon Music all target −14; Apple Music sits at −16 and will simply turn your master down slightly. Broadcast television is the exception at −23 LUFS under EBU R128.
What is the difference between LUFS and dB?
dB describes signal level at a point in time, and peak dB tells you only whether the loudest sample will clip. LUFS measures perceived loudness over the whole programme, weighted for how human hearing responds to different frequencies, which is why two files with identical peaks can sound very different in volume.
Why does my song sound quieter on Spotify than in my editor?
Because playback is normalised. If your master is louder than −14 LUFS, the platform turns it down to match everything else, and the loudness you added by compressing and limiting is discarded — leaving the reduced dynamic range behind. Mastering quieter and letting the platform leave it alone gives a better result.
Should I normalise before or after noise reduction?
After. Normalising first raises the noise floor along with the signal and leaves the denoiser less headroom to work in. Clean the recording, then set its level as the final step before export.