[MLA] More good news (Spotify)

[Bob Katz]

Hey guys, I came up with that first: album normalization for everything. 
I've argued for that from day one.


Bob K.


On 5/23/17 3:02 PM, Robert Ludwig 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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>
>
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-- 

If you want good sound on your album, come to Bob Katz 407-831-0233 
DIGITAL DOMAIN MASTERING STUDIO Author: *Mastering Audio *Digital Domain 
Website <http://www.digido.com/> No trees were killed in the sending of 
this message. However a large number of electrons were terribly 
inconvenienced.

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