Since YT and Spotify are some of the predominant ways people listen to music these days, and they normalize loudness, music producers are starting to go back to more normal masters, thankfully.
I'm very pleased by everything I just read in this link — they really think of the user first, and favor music quality and the general experience. It's exactly how I did/do it myself, manually.
Awesome, really awesome to learn that the loudness war is finally coming to a close.
Really glad to know Spotify is on the side of science, here.
[1]: This blog has got to be the most interesting I ever read on whatever topic it touches, including the objective vs subjective debate: http://nwavguy.blogspot.com/2011/05/subjective-vs-objective-...
What I meant is that there is a sizeable chunk of the audiophile industry (a certain press, electronics brands, stores and even studios themselves) that conveniently avoids any and all scientific testing, and promotes typical snake-oil "features" and "specs". Quite sadly for their abused customers.
One of the worst trends in my opinion was faking technical format quality by using different masters on each — with the shitty master on CD/MP3 and the good one, more dynamic, on DVD/SACD/vinyl etc. The latter always sounded better simply because it wasn't the same source!
In such matters, I guess we can trust Spotify based on their claims, and anecdotally I tend to believe them.
This avoids the problem of cruder methods, where you take, say, the peak dB as the "loudness" of the track. Doing it that way would take a fairly quiet song with one overly dramatic drum hit and make it so you couldn't hear the rest.
EDIT: I think they will also turn a track up if it's under the target, but I'm not absolutely sure. There would be no real reason not to.
> ReplayGain is different from peak normalization. Peak normalization merely ensures that the peak amplitude reaches a certain level. This does not ensure equal loudness. The ReplayGain technique measures the effective power of the waveform (i.e. the RMS power after applying an "equal loudness contour"), and then adjusts the amplitude of the waveform accordingly. The result is that Replay Gained waveforms are usually more uniformly amplified than peak-normalized waveforms.
Generally we indeed target both up or down in loudness (although 'up' is quite rare, typically high-end recordings of classical or jazz or otherwise very dynamic pieces).
Honestly, everything I read screams that Spotify really hired the right people to make these decisions.
Now I only have to rent about their handling (or rather, lackthereof) of metadata — how hard is it to display an actual first release date? but meh. Audio quality is great, no question about it. I just wish they'd stream FLAC in very-high quality + "quiet" environment settings (the "pure hi-fi" experience so to speak), but that'll come in due time I suppose.
I guess they don't want to bother with limiters, so understandable.
There's a bigger problem, though. My girlfriend complained about volume fluctuations in her car between tracks. She uses an iPhone so I enabled "Soundcheck" (Apple's normalisation). It works fine in the car. But now she complains that headphones simply aren't loud enough. It turns out that the volume controls are essentially made for overly-compressed, loud content and can't sufficiently amplify dynamic content.
So, unfortunately, people will just turn it off and there's still an advantage to mastering "loud".
I also wonder if the resurgence of vinyl, and rise of home producers on bandcamp/soundcloud/etc have helped contribute.
Spotify normalizes volume to a LUFS level, which is not nearly the same thing as overly compressing dynamics and causing clipping.
https://www.sweetwater.com/insync/what-is-lufs-and-why-shoul...