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Hi all,

Newbie question - a library is signing a few tracks, and their delivery specs include the line "Average mix level at around -12RMS"

They are asking for the track, plus the track broken into a few stems (leads, synths, fx, etc.)

Honestly not totally sure what this means - currently I have final tracks "mastered" with Ozone set to -1.0db peak.

Do they want the full track as-is and then the submix tracks peaking lower, or?

Thank you!
Michael

RMS is an average over time, your Ozone should have meters that display this. Here is a link to a video on Peak Vs RMS https://youtu.be/gV-Y5Zg_rUA

It sounds like the Library don't want stuff that's been hyper compressed which is all good in my book , some libraries are the opposite and I have delivered tracks at -8RMS which they have said is not loud enough !

There Apps that will quickly analyze a whole file for you too, I don't know if Ozone has this feature but there are free websites such as this one https://youlean.co/file-loudness-meter/

Just to confuse you even further a lot of the audio industry have moved over to describing in LUFS now which are loudness units but for practical purposes 1 LUF = 1db - so if you scan your file with the above, you should be aiming for -12 intergrated LUFS

As far as your peak level goes you may be able to increase it to -0.3db without any problems - if you go higher it can cause inter-sample peaks which manifests itself as distortion with some DACs

For the stems , I wouldn't overthink it - as long as the main mix is correct just bounce the stems out at the exact same level without adjusting anything and they will be fine.

Mark

Thanks Mark - very helpful!