Audio Analysis Metrics Loudness Spectrum: The Working Method

There is a short answer and a useful answer. The short one fits in a sentence and will not change anything you do.

This covers audio analysis metrics loudness spectrum the way it actually works in a session: the mechanism, the numbers that matter, and the decisions that follow from them.

Nothing below is theory for its own sake. Every number here is one you can check on a meter, and every step is one you can run on the next track you open.

Key takeaways

Balance with faders before you reach for a plugin.
Cut to solve problems, boost to flatter, and know which you are doing.
Check in mono early and often.
Leave 3 to 6 dB of headroom for mastering.

What LUFS measures, and why RMS was not enough

LUFS stands for Loudness Units relative to Full Scale. It is a perceptual measurement: it weights frequencies the way human hearing does, using the K-weighting curve from ITU-R BS.1770, then averages energy over time.

That weighting is the whole point. A 60 Hz sine and a 3 kHz sine at identical peak levels read very differently on a LUFS meter, because your ears are far more sensitive in the upper midrange. Peak meters and RMS meters both miss this, which is why two tracks with identical peaks can sound a decibel or three apart.

Integrated LUFS: the loudness of the entire track. This is the number platforms use.
Short-term LUFS: a three-second window, useful for checking whether a chorus jumps too far.
Momentary LUFS: a 400 ms window, closest to what you perceive moment to moment.
LRA (Loudness Range): the spread between quiet and loud sections, in LU.

Where genres and platform targets sit on the loudness scale.

Where every platform sits

These targets have been stable for years. Master to the tightest one that matters for your release and the rest take care of themselves.

Platform	Integrated target	True peak ceiling
Spotify	-14 LUFS	-1 dBTP
Apple Music	-16 LUFS	-1 dBTP
YouTube	-14 LUFS	-1 dBTP
TIDAL	-14 LUFS	-1 dBTP
Amazon Music	-14 LUFS	-2 dBTP
Deezer	-15 LUFS	-1 dBTP
SoundCloud	-14 LUFS	-1 dBTP
TikTok and Reels	-14 LUFS	-1 dBTP

The pattern is obvious once you see it laid out. Almost everyone converged on -14 LUFS. Apple sits two decibels quieter, and Bandcamp does not normalise at all.

Why louder stopped working

Before normalisation, a louder master genuinely sounded better in a playlist, because loud is the first thing the ear reads as quality. That was the entire mechanism behind the loudness war.

Normalisation removed the reward and kept the penalty. Every platform now turns loud masters down to a common target, so a squashed master and a dynamic one arrive at your listener's ears at the same volume. The difference is that the squashed one gave up its transients to get there.

A kick drum that peaks 8 dB above the mix has impact. The same kick limited to 2 dB above the mix does not, and no amount of playback gain puts that back.

How to check your master properly

Measure integrated loudness over the full track, from first sample to last.
Check true peak, not sample peak. Set your meter to 4x oversampling minimum.
Encode to AAC at 256 kbps and re-measure. Lossy encoding creates peaks that were not in your WAV.
Listen at a fixed monitoring level so you are judging tone, not volume.
A/B against a commercial reference in the same genre, level-matched to within 0.5 LU.

That last step is the one people skip, and it is the one that actually tells you something. Comparing an unmatched reference just tells you which file is louder.

Knowing when to stop

There is a point in every session where further work stops improving the record and starts merely changing it. Recognising that point is most of the skill.

You are undoing changes as often as you are making them.
You cannot articulate what the last move fixed.
The reference no longer sounds obviously better in any specific way.
You are adjusting things you would not notice as a listener.

Bounce it, sleep on it, and listen once in the morning on a system you did not use to make it. That single listen tells you more than another two hours ever will.

How it translates on real systems

Almost nobody hears your record on the system you made it on. The point of every decision above is that it survives the journey.

System	What it exposes	What to check
Phone speaker	No low end at all below roughly 500 Hz	Does the bass line still read from its harmonics?
Earbuds	Exaggerated width and sub, hyped top	Is anything sibilant or fatiguing?
Laptop	Thin midrange-only playback	Is the vocal still intelligible?
Car	Boomy low end and road noise	Does the low end turn to mush at 80 to 120 Hz?
Club system	Everything below 40 Hz, loud	Is the sub mono and controlled?

If it works on a phone and in a car, it works almost everywhere else. Those two are the honest tests.

What MaestroNet does with this

MaestroNet analyses the source before it processes anything: spectral balance against a genre reference curve, crest factor, stereo correlation across frequency, transient density, and where the energy actually sits.

The targets move with the style. The chain does not. That matters, because a system that swaps in a different EQ curve regardless of what you sent will fight a mix that was already correct.

Loudness targeting to the platform standard, measured integrated across the whole track.
True peak limiting with oversampling, so the AAC encode stays clean.
Bass management below the crossover, keeping the low end mono and centred.
Tonal correction referenced to the selected style, applied in broad strokes rather than narrow ones.

What it will not do is decide that the second chorus should feel bigger than the first. That is an interpretive call, and it stays yours.

Frequently asked questions

What is the most important thing to get right with audio analysis metrics loudness spectrum?

Tonal balance and translation. A track that holds up on a phone, in a car and on monitors is finished. One that only works on your monitors is not.

What loudness should I target?

-14 LUFS integrated with a -1 dBTP ceiling covers almost all streaming. Go quieter for acoustic and classical material, louder only where the genre genuinely demands it.

How much headroom should the mix have?

Three to six decibels, with no limiter on the mix bus. That gives the mastering stage something to work with.

How do I know when it is finished?

When it holds up level-matched against a commercial reference, translates on several systems, keeps its low end in mono, and your changes have stopped improving it.