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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.

EBU R128 logo

This recommendation marks ...

After recording a podcast or speech audio, it is usually necessary to modify the recorded levels. This post illustrates how to normalize the subjective loudness and how to compress the dynamic range (= difference between the loudest and softest sounds) of an audio file.

Loudness normalization is one of the most common misunderstandings in audio post production. Many people use peak normalization, which ensures that the maximum peak (= the maximum value of the audio data) reaches a specific level. However, the human perception of loudness does NOT depend on peak levels, therefore peak normalization is mostly useless. Recordings should ...