In the classic loudness war, music and radio producers have been trying to create their recordings as loud as possible and loudness normalization was introduced to stop that. Now one can see the start of a new loudness target war, where podcasters set their loudness targets higher and higher, mainly triggered by high target recommendations of platforms like Spotify or Amazon Alexa.
In this article, we will show how to resist the loudness target war and still be compliant with major platforms.

Resist the loudness target war! (Photo by Nayani Teixeira)

What's the problem?

“Two or three ...

At the Subscribe 9 Conference, we presented the first version of our new Audio Inspector:
The Auphonic Audio Inspector is shown on the status page of a finished production and displays details about what our algorithms are changing in audio files.

A screenshot of the Auphonic Audio Inspector on the status page of a finished Multitrack Production.
Please click on the screenshot to see it in full resolution!

It is possible to zoom and scroll within audio waveforms and the Audio Inspector might be used to manually check production result and input files.

In this blog post, we will ...

Once in a while it is necessary to convert big audio or video archives to new formats and metadata conventions, other servers, new loudness targets or apply some audio processing/restoration algorithms.
Now we offer a managed processing of archives to companies and institutions, where we adapt our algorithms and workflows to special requirements of our clients, implement all steps (no need to program the Auphonic API yourself) and perform the whole process on dedicated hardware to speed-up the conversion.

National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory.

What we can offer

We are happy to release version 1.6 of the Auphonic Leveler Batch Processor and version 1.2 of the Auphonic Multitrack Processor with new features and bug fixes for Mac and Windows (see Changelog below).

• Auphonic Leveler Download
• Auphonic Multitrack Download

Changelog

• Opus Encoder and Decoder:
  We included an opus encoder and decoder in all apps. Opus is particularly interesting for podcasts due to its suitability for both, music and speech, and its outstanding sound quality at also very low bitrates. For more see Opus, the revolutionary open ...

The Auphonic multitrack algorithms have been in Private Beta since May 2014 and after a long development process and many refinements, we are releasing them to the general public today!
UPDATE: More recent information about our multitrack algorithms can be found here!

Audio statistics of an Auphonic production with multiple tracks.
Music segments are displayed in red and the speakers in gray.

About Auphonic Multitrack

The Auphonic Multitrack Algorithms use multiple input audio tracks in one production: speech tracks recorded from multiple microphones, music tracks, remote speakers via phone, skype, etc. Auphonic processes all tracks individually as well as ...

Last week we presented our new multitrack algorithms at the Podlove Podcaster Workshop in Berlin. Lot's of users asked us about a multitrack version of our system before - now it's here and can be used!
We reworked all our algorithms and therefore start with a private beta program for our long-term users and supporters.

Audio statistics of an Auphonic production with multiple tracks.
Music segments are displayed in red and the two speakers in gray and black.

UPDATE:
The Auphonic multitrack algorithms are now released officially: Auphonic Multitrack Release.

What is Multitrack?

Auphonic is optimized to process ...

Finally we found some time to collect a few listening examples for our audio algorithms – thanks to all the people who provided audio files!
Everything is processed automatically and you can try Auphonic yourself with the unprocessed files and will get the same results.

The official Auphonic Audio Example page is here: Audio Examples.
We will extend this page with further examples, so let us know if you have some great ones!

Global Loudness Normalization

Our Global Loudness Normalization Algorithms calculate the loudness of your audio and ...

Have you ever wondered how loud your audio productions should be? So have we, because it's a quite tricky question to answer!

On the one hand, you want to make sure your productions are loud enough. For example, they should still appear at a reasonable level in noisy environments (car, airplane, etc.), and their loudness should be comparable to that of other programs, no matter whether those are produced by yourself or by others.

On the other hand, you certainly don't want to compromise sound quality for sheer loudness. We have discussed in Audio loudness measurement and normalization with ...

Have you ever wondered why commercials sound louder than your favorite TV shows? Or why you have to adjust the playback volume on your television when switching between channels? The answer is that until recently, there was no standard way to measure the perceived loudness of sound recordings. Instead, audio productions were (and still are) normalized to peak levels, which do in no way determine how loud a signal is.

In this article we will discuss the EBU recommendation R128, a new and open standard for balancing audio programs according to their actually perceived loudness.

This recommendation marks ...

For those who don't know it yet: we opened the auphonic automatic audio post production web service for the general public!
This means that everyone can create a free account and use the system for the post production of podcasts, audio books, lecture recordings, screencasts, or whatever you want. Please let us know what you think and tell us your feature requests!

Click here to create a free account:
Auphonic Registration

Current Audio Algorithms

Only a subset of the auphonic algorithms are activated at the moment, focusing on loudness and level management. Furthermore we filter unnecessary and disturbing frequencies, but ...