How to check the loudness of a track
- Drop your finished mix, master or podcast episode on the box above.
- Wait while your browser measures it with the same BS.1770 method streaming services use.
- Read the verdicts: each platform tells you if the track is on target, too quiet, or will be turned down, and whether the peaks are safe.
Loudness targets by platform
Spotify, YouTube, Amazon Music and Tidal: about −14 LUFS. Apple Music: about −16 LUFS. Podcasts: −16 LUFS (stereo). TV and radio: −23 LUFS (EBU R128, Europe) or −24 LKFS (ATSC A/85, US). These are the levels the services normalize playback to; check each platform's current guidance before release.
Frequently asked questions
What loudness should I master to for Spotify?
Spotify normalizes to about -14 LUFS integrated and recommends keeping true peaks at or below -1 dBTP (-2 dBTP for very loud masters). Louder tracks are simply turned down, so mastering much hotter than -14 LUFS gains nothing on Spotify.
What is LUFS?
LUFS (Loudness Units relative to Full Scale) measures how loud audio sounds to people, not just how high its peaks are. Integrated LUFS is the average over the whole track, measured with the ITU-R BS.1770 standard that streaming services and broadcasters use.
What is true peak (dBTP)?
True peak estimates the highest level the waveform reaches between samples, after conversion back to analog. Peaks above -1 dBTP can clip when a service converts your file to MP3 or AAC.
How accurate is this meter?
It follows ITU-R BS.1770-4 and EBU R128 (K-weighting, 400 ms gated blocks, relative gate). In our tests its integrated loudness matched FFmpeg's EBU R128 meter within 0.1 LU, and true peak within about 0.1 dB.
What loudness is right for podcasts and YouTube?
Most podcast apps expect about -16 LUFS (stereo) with peaks under -1 dBTP. YouTube plays music at about -14 LUFS and turns louder uploads down, but does not turn quieter ones up.
MP3 encoding uses LAME (lame.sourceforge.io, LGPL) via lamejs. Your files are processed on your device and never uploaded.