Oh no, not the loudness wars. 🙁

That makes me sad. Most of my tunes are in 96Khz 32bit floating point .wav (that’s 96k sample rate not bit rate like on mp3s the bit rate would be 61440Kbs lol!). They come out at about 250MB per tune. :laugh_at:

If I was going to release them I would dither and truncate them to at least 96k 24bit, but I’d probably let a master engineer do this after mastering my track.

@Dr Bunsen 558180 wrote:

Received this today…

Quote:

Sent from Windows Mail

yeah turn up those amps bunsen, more levels is better !

Incidentally I have recently reactivated replaygain on VFR Europe, and whilst it does force down the level of some shows and the manual gives a confusing message that the average level is -14 dBFS (peak audio) on checking with an Orban meter it appears to be -14 LUFS (loudness units), which is sort of in line with the R128 (still under development) for a pop music based / station aimed at younger listeners; the ideal of -23 LUFS is too quiet for those with portable devices or listening on smaller loudspeakers. Indeed, the Norway public broadcasters use -14 LUFS for youth stations and -23 LUFS for the classical music station and news/talk station

I also have conducted various experiments with a low cost SIM and a second hand Android mobile device to listen to the stream mobile using 3G network (I will put up a separate post about this) – and found that -14 LUFS does deliver enough level for comfortably listening upon headphones (cheap €5-€10 sets, both full size and earbuds), and is actually more pleasant to listen on these cheap cans than higher levels. There may also be some code in then Android audio kernel drivers that recognises the correct loudness level.

It also makes it more difficult to push the level up too hard when on the move (such as riding a bicycle), which is good for your own and others road safety. (I was able to listen for a large part of an 11km bicycle ride yesterday).

@DaftFader 560986 wrote:

-1dBFS FTW

you can get away with that even with live programme material providing there are suitable limiters, and you are also monitoring true peak level at the listeners end – what is discouraged is the “loudness sausage” and doubling up on codecs to save bandwidth, which one of the Ofcom chaps found out the big broadcasters are doing as he wondered why the output of an experimental DAB tranmission system built up of scrounged components including a 10 year old PC used as a encoder sounded way better than the existing DAB radio stations!

apparently in ES and FR it is now law that all broadcasters (which means anyone who sends audio to be listened to by a group of people, including Internet stations) must be following R128 loudness recommendations as much as possible, and if they repeatedly transmit bad audio the Communications Ministry can disconnect or block their stream or and/have their transmitter turned off!