YouTube Upload Sound Alteration

[Chipotle]

Reaper has a simple meter called, oddly, "Loudness Meter" that will show integrated LUFS, and a pretty transparent limiter called ReaLimit that can do true peak limiting.

However, I use the aforementioned YouLean and Ozone Elements, which has been given away free in the past (so I suppose might be again). I have to set the Ozone Maximizer manually but it's pretty easy to use.

[Mortimer Nelson]

Has anything changed with YouTube's new 'improved' faster upload process? It seems to me that any compression or normalization I do at all (and I don't do much) affects the quality more now, and I stay well under -14.

[Sasquatchian]

Logic Pro also has great loudness meters built in without having to buy anything, including true peak meters and LUFS meters as well and Fab Filter's limiter is perfect for setting your true peak to exactly minus one, or whatever you want.

[DupleMeter]

Originally Posted by Mortimer Nelson

Has anything changed with YouTube's new 'improved' faster upload process? It seems to me that any compression or normalization I do at all (and I don't do much) affects the quality more now, and I stay well under -14.

YouTube pretty much leaves your audio alone until you cross tha -14LUFS threshold. Then they lower it to that level via limiting...very crunchy, ugly sounding limiting.

One of my secrets is to leave a tiny bit of room. So the YouTube specs say
-14LUFS integrated loudness (ITU/EBU measurment)
-1dBTP

So, when I master for YouTube I set myself so I have a -14.3 LUFS and -1.3dBTP peak. In both cases they are -0.3dB lower/under their requirements. This leaves room for our measurements differing (it happens), but is unnoticeable otherwise. This also guards against lower quality transfers that exhibit higher peaks. So, when someone streams & has a network hiccup, the peak they get can be up to 0.3dB higher than the true peak, due to network packet issues causing intermodulation.

[rick-slo]

Originally Posted by DupleMeter

YouTube pretty much leaves your audio alone until you cross tha -14LUFS threshold. Then they lower it to that level via limiting...very crunchy, ugly sounding limiting.

One of my secrets is to leave a tiny bit of room. So the YouTube specs say
-14LUFS integrated loudness (ITU/EBU measurment)
-1dBTP

So, when I master for YouTube I set myself so I have a -14.3 LUFS and -1.3dBTP peak. In both cases they are -0.3dB lower/under their requirements. This leaves room for our measurements differing (it happens), but is unnoticeable otherwise. This also guards against lower quality transfers that exhibit higher peaks. So, when someone streams & has a network hiccup, the peak they get can be up to 0.3dB higher than the true peak, due to network packet issues causing intermodulation.

At least in many cases why can't they just record the submitted recording at a lower volume to get to the -14LUFS rather than using just a limiter (preserve the dynamic range and not squash some of the transients)?

[rick-slo]

Originally Posted by DupleMeter

YouTube pretty much leaves your audio alone until you cross tha -14LUFS threshold. Then they lower it to that level via limiting...very crunchy, ugly sounding limiting.

One of my secrets is to leave a tiny bit of room. So the YouTube specs say
-14LUFS integrated loudness (ITU/EBU measurment)
-1dBTP

So, when I master for YouTube I set myself so I have a -14.3 LUFS and -1.3dBTP peak. In both cases they are -0.3dB lower/under their requirements. This leaves room for our measurements differing (it happens), but is unnoticeable otherwise. This also guards against lower quality transfers that exhibit higher peaks. So, when someone streams & has a network hiccup, the peak they get can be up to 0.3dB higher than the true peak, due to network packet issues causing intermodulation.

At least in many cases why can't they just record the submitted recording at a lower volume to get to the -14LUFS rather than using just a limiter (preserve more of the dynamic range and not squash some of the transients)?

[DupleMeter]

Originally Posted by rick-slo

At least in many cases why can't they just record the submitted recording at a lower volume to get to the -14LUFS rather than using just a limiter (preserve the dynamic range and not squash some of the transients)?

That's a good question. I would add, why don't they raise the level of audio that is under the spec?