[MLA] More good news (Spotify)

[Kevin Gross]

The album loudness normalization all the time recommendation dates back to
our whitepaper in 2012:

"We propose that album normalization be turned on as a default, in order to
satisfy the aesthetics
of the artist and album producer and the majority of playback situations."


As I recall, Eelco and I couldn't get Bob Katz fully on board with this so
an accompanying footnote says:

"We believe album normalization best serves the artist's intent in most
playback scenarios. One possible exception is for dance parties where it
may be desirable to use per-track normalization so that ballads play as
loudly as the loud songs regardless of the normal aesthetics. We suggest
that deactivation of album normalization be set on a playlist basis,
remaining in force by default for all other playlists."

With regards to tones, there was a certain 1980's vintage mixing desk that
had an integrated CRT for the automation system. I have been shown
commercial digital releases from that with the CRT horizontal scanning
contaminating the audio with a 17 kHz tone. I forget the level but loud
enough for someone with great hearing to notice. Definitely very annoying
for a dog or LUFS meter.

Kevin

On Tue, May 23, 2017 at 9:02 PM, Robert Ludwig <gatewaybob at mac.com> wrote:

> Hi Eelco and Ian,
>
> This is all amazing.  Using Album normalization for everything is
> something that just never occurred to me, thanks for out-of-the-box
> thinking, Eelco!
>
> Yes, I've know Buddy Judge pretty well for over 5 years now, we worked
> together during the “pre-release” stage of MFiT.  I met him in person in
> California and he has always been very straight forward with me.  I’m so
> glad to finally read SOME rationale for why Apple has not turned on Sound
> Check.
>
> I had two questions:
>
> 1.  I agree that all services should use the same algorithm for
> normalization.
>
> Eelco, I’m not clear about this:
> VERY often we do a single that is being released *before* the album is
> finished.
> How will the average album level be determined if there is no album with
> which to measure when the single is released?
>
> 2. Does Sound Check measure highly compressed music any better than BS1770
> (I assume -4)?  I’d be surprised if it did.
>
> That is mind-blowing that someone would put 20kHz tones into the music in
> order to make it louder.
>
> I’m very encouraged by all of this!
>
> All my best,
> Bob L.
>
>
> Yesterday Buddy Judge, senior product manager at Apple and responsible for
> iTunes, came to me after my presentation. We had a beer and then we even
> went for dinner together ("all on Tim" :-). Buddy is a cool guy and a
> musician (I guess Bob Ludwig knows him well since he is also the guy behind
> "Mastered for iTunes"). Buddy told me a few interesting things that may
> help us understand why normalization was not turned on by default yet:
> 1. The artistic integrity is very important for Apple. Just like Tidal
> they do not like that with track normalization the loudness integrity of an
> album is disturbed. Buddy told me it had never come to his mind to advocate
> using album normalization even in shuffle mode, but he found it an
> interesting concept that he would love to test.
> 2. Buddy said that if normalization would be turned on by default, all
> streaming services should use the same type of normalization so mastering
> engineers can anticipate to it and would not have to make seperate masters
> for every different platform (because many will likely still aim for being
> the loudest). ITU BS1770 seemed to make most sense to him, although he knew
> that compressed music is measured a little too loud by BS1770. Album
> normalization with the loudest track aligned to target level also made most
> sense (in my presentation I showed that when normalizing the _average_
> album level (like currently in iTunes), the loudness of the loud hit tracks
> would only be known when the full album is finished - this is a clear no-go
> for a mastering engineer).
>
> We promised to stay in regular contact the next few months and all in all
> this feels _very_ encouraging.
>
> But this brings me to an important note. Pop music mastering engineers
> might even be worse than Italian commercial mix engineers. So if the latter
> ingest 20 kHz tones just above the relative gate threshold, to gain 1 or 2
> dB of level, this will probably happen to pop masters too. Florian, it will
> become even more important to convince ITU to add the HF low pass filter to
> K weighting, so we better make sure that this development is not delayed
> too much...
>
> Cheers,
> Eelco
>
>
>
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