Levels on a LUF-ly day.

[GBall]

Newbie question about EBU -23 or other loudness standards. Instrumental requests are for film/series/advertising a lot. I am assuming a cue eventually has to follow those rules before it goes out, but those that I've heard here seem a whole lot hotter than that. What are the reviewer's expectation for submitting? Mastered for streaming -14 LUFS? EBU 128? Something else?

Thank you very much in advance,
Greg

[ResonantTone]

The thing to remember here is that you aren't creating the final master track for Film/Television broadcast standards... your entire track is simply one of the many tracks used in the music editors DAW. He/She is the one mixing all those tracks down and setting it to industry standards. Your best bet (in my opinion) is to create the best sounding tracks you can for the genre and not worry too much about meeting standards for streaming or any other final product type of release.

Sound quality is paramount, and that includes loudness for a lot of genres... especially stuff like pop, EDM, etc. They way they are mixed/mastered will have a direct impact on how the track comes across to a music supervisor that skimming the first 5-10 seconds of a bunch of tracks. If yours sounds quiet when compared to everyone else's, you're probably gonna get passed right on by.

Hope that helps a bit!

Andrew

[GBall]

Helps a bit - <grin/> Thank you sir.

[cosmicdolphin]

The loudness war still seems to be being fought, I have had Librariees ask me to make things LOUDER ...never had any of them ask me to make something quieter to give it more dynamic range

[YellowStudio]

I usually use reference tracks in different styles as a guideline for LUFS and eq in my tracks. Download preview files from some libraries and analyse.

[Kolstad]

I use the plugin “Levels” from Mastering The Mix. Takes out all the speculation on this, just using the presets.

[cassmcentee]

I finish as loud as I can without losing quality...
Only once has a library rejected a mix for being too loud
My last plugin on the Master Buss is Rob Chiarelli's M1 Limiter Lite set to -0.30
(appx 80 tunes in 10 libraries)
Hope that helps!
Cass