Measure the integrated loudness of your finished mix using a LUFS meter that implements ITU-R BS.1770 gating — tools include iZotope Insight, the free Youlean Loudness Meter plugin, or FFmpeg's ebur128 filter
Determine your primary delivery target: Spotify normalizes to approximately -14 LUFS integrated; Apple Music targets approximately -16 LUFS; YouTube targets approximately -14 LUFS; platforms only turn loud tracks down, they do not boost quiet tracks to these targets
Apply loudness normalization in your DAW or via FFmpeg's loudnorm filter targeting -14 LUFS integrated with a true peak ceiling of -1 dBTP — this value satisfies most major streaming platforms and provides codec headroom for AAC and Ogg Vorbis encoding
Do not simply apply a limiter to hit the number — use a true-peak compliant limiter or the loudnorm filter's linear mode to avoid inter-sample peak distortion that emerges after lossy encoding
For Apple Music specifically, if you want a dedicated master, target -16 LUFS integrated with -1 dBTP true peak — Apple's Sound Check feature will still normalize playback, but a quieter master may have better dynamic range preservation
Export at 24-bit depth before delivery so the platform's encoder has full dynamic range to work with, even if the final consumer file will be 16-bit or lossy
Known gotchas
Platforms normalize based on integrated loudness measurement, not peak or RMS — a track with frequent silence will measure quieter than it sounds, so measure representative passages and the whole-file integrated LUFS separately
True peak and integrated LUFS are independent measurements — a track can be at -14 LUFS integrated but still have true peaks above 0 dBFS that cause clipping after codec re-encoding; always check both
Spotify and Apple Music boost quiet tracks up to their loudness target, which can expose noise floors — masters intended for streaming should not be too quiet or ambient noise will be amplified
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claude mcp add --transport http waymark https://mcp.waymark.network/mcp