Fundamentals

LUFS vs Peak: Two Different Measurements

Peak level (dBFS or dBTP) tells you the loudest single moment in a file, useful for making sure nothing clips. LUFS tells you something different: how loud the file is perceived across its whole duration, weighted to match human hearing and gated so quiet sections don't drag the average down. A file can have a low peak and still read loud in LUFS if it's heavily compressed, or a high peak and read quiet in LUFS if it's dynamic with occasional transients. Once you've measured a file here, you can normalize it to a streaming target (or a plain peak target) and download the result directly, pure gain, capped so true peak never crosses -1 dBTP. If all you need is a quick, single-purpose peak normalize with no loudness measurement at all, the audio normalizer does that on its own, a one-number gain change with no loudness modeling involved.

Methodology

Why Integrated LUFS Uses Gating

A silent intro or a quiet breakdown shouldn't make a track measure quieter than it actually sounds during its loud sections. The ITU-R BS.1770 standard this meter follows handles that with two gates: an absolute gate drops any 400ms window quieter than -70 LUFS outright (near-silence), and a relative gate then drops any window more than 10 LU quieter than the track's own average, so a breakdown doesn't skew the reading either. What's left is averaged into the integrated LUFS figure, a number that tracks how loud the track feels to a listener sitting through the whole thing, not just its instantaneous peaks.

Targets

Platform Loudness Targets

Most streaming platforms normalize playback loudness to a target, turning louder masters down (and, on some platforms, quieter masters up) to a consistent level:

Note that club and DJ masters running hotter than streaming targets isn't a mistake: a DJ mixer or club sound system adds its own gain on top, and tracks in a set are usually gain-matched by ear or by a controller's auto-gain, not played back at a fixed loudness target the way a streaming app is.

Honest answer

How Loud Should a DJ Track Be?

There is no single correct LUFS number for a DJ master, and anyone who tells you otherwise is oversimplifying. Beatport-style club masters commonly sit around -8 LUFS integrated, sometimes hotter, because they're built to compete in a mix and get gain-staged again by a mixer downstream. A track mastered at -14 LUFS for Spotify will often feel notably quieter dropped into a DJ set next to -8 LUFS club masters, even though -14 is the "correct" streaming target. If you master for both contexts, expect to make two versions, or accept the loudness gap and compensate on the mixer.

Frequently Asked Questions