<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class="">Hi Bob L,<div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Even if the user has selected Album Norm, the system should revert to Track Norm (and Track Target Level) for a case like you describe. That’s related to some <i class="">production aspects</i> I don’t like about potential Album Norm: The loop becomes less predictable. Now, during mastering, you can compare several versions of a track loudness normalized, and decide which one is the best. With Album Norm, this gets blurred. It’s also unfortunate that the same track will get a different gain depending on whether it’s from an original album, a “best of”, or a compilation. More ambiguity.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">To your second question: Most certainly not. Where it’s difficult to make BS.1770 return an unreasonable result, examples with Sound Check may readily be found. Maybe you recall our general BS.1770 vs SC comparisons from a while back. Ian commented wrt soft often getting too loud - to which I agree - you found the Victoria Mullova track with obvious clipping, and recently we’ve seen a host of insanely loud tracks that probably saturates the SC measurement; result being that they end up way too loud. Like 12 dB or more.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Playing around with HF tones can sometimes buy one or two dB extra with BS.1770, but at the risk of angry customers, burned tweeters and defunct lossy codecs. Another technicality we shouldn’t take too seriously for all the confusion and ripple effects it would cause. Should it ever become a problem, filter or reject at ingest.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">cheers,</div><div class="">Thomas</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><br class=""><div><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On 23/05/2017, at 21.02, Robert Ludwig <<a href="mailto:gatewaybob@mac.com" class="">gatewaybob@mac.com</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8" class=""><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class="">Hi Eelco and Ian,<div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">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!</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">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. </div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">I had two questions:</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">1. I agree that all services should use the same algorithm for normalization.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Eelco, I’m not clear about this:</div><div class="">VERY often we do a single that is being released <u class="">before</u> the album is finished. </div><div class="">How will the average album level be determined if there is no album with which to measure when the single is released?</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">2. Does Sound Check measure highly compressed music any better than BS1770 (I assume -4)? I’d be surprised if it did.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">That is mind-blowing that someone would put 20kHz tones into the music in order to make it louder. </div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">I’m very encouraged by all of this!</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">All my best,</div><div class="">Bob L.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><div class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">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:<br class="">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.<br class="">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).<br class=""><br class="">We promised to stay in regular contact the next few months and all in all this feels _very_ encouraging. <br class=""><br class="">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...<br class=""><br class="">Cheers,<br class="">Eelco<br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class="">_______________________________________________<br class="">MLA mailing list<br class=""><a href="mailto:MLA@grimmaudio.nl" class="">MLA@grimmaudio.nl</a><br class=""><a href="http://grimmaudio.nl/mailman/listinfo/mla_grimmaudio.nl" class="">http://grimmaudio.nl/mailman/listinfo/mla_grimmaudio.nl</a><br class=""></div></blockquote></div><br class=""></div></div>_______________________________________________<br class="">MLA mailing list<br class=""><a href="mailto:MLA@grimmaudio.nl" class="">MLA@grimmaudio.nl</a><br class="">http://grimmaudio.nl/mailman/listinfo/mla_grimmaudio.nl<br class=""></div></blockquote></div><br class=""></div></body></html>