Some individual tracks can be as loud as -12 LUFS and some a quieter -16LUFS. When Soundcheck IS enabled, Apple Music streams audio at an average of -14 LUFS.

It might not be long before Apple Music follows the trends of other streaming platforms enables Soundcheck as the default. Normalisation is a good thing and should be encouraged. You can turn normalisation off, but most people probably don’t.Ĭonversely, Apple Music doesn’t normalise music as a default. It’s widely known in the audio community that Spotify normalises tracks to around -14LUFS integrated as a default setting. Hit the ‘MFiT preset and check your last master to see if it had this issue. Check out the 15 day free trial of our plugin LEVELS which has a highly accurate true peak meter… 16x oversampling for you nerds. This SUPER SIMPLE step will mean that your music isn’t distorting when it’s reaching listeners. You need to leave around -1dBTP (decibels True Peak) of headroom to anticipate this transcoding process. If you’ve mastered to 0dB using the peak programme meter found on the master channel in your DAW, then your music will be digitally distorting when it’s streamed by Apple Music. They then stream this file through Apple Music.ĭuring this transcoding process, the peak of the audio will almost always increase.

But I’ll show you how to avoid it and an example of how I successfully avoided it with a track I mastered for a major label.Īpple transcodes the lossless file given to them to AAC (advanced audio codec) at 256kbps. In my research, I’ve discovered a worrying truth about the way a lot of music is submitted to iTunes. I’ll go into some depth on the production side of things for the artists who really care about their music and engineers who care about their clients. In this post I’ll discuss how to master your music to give listeners the best possible listening experience. With over 27 million subscribers, Apple Music is a major player in the music streaming industry.

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