Audio levels and loudness

A station that lurches — a jingle that shouts, a track you have to lean in for, a bulletin that vanishes under the music — is not a mixing problem. It is a measurement problem, and Studio measures it for you.

Loud is not the same as tall

Two words get used interchangeably and they are not the same thing.

Peak is the single loudest instant in a file — how tall the waveform gets. Loudness is how loud the whole thing feels while it plays.

A whisper with one door-slam in it has a high peak and feels quiet. A shouted advert, squashed flat so every syllable is the same size, feels enormous and may never peak any higher than that door-slam.

This is why turning something up does not always make it louder. If a file already touches the ceiling, there is nowhere for the peaks to go: push it and the tops get chopped off, which sounds harsh and cannot be undone. What you wanted was for it to *feel* louder, and that is a different measurement.

Studio works in LUFS, the broadcast standard for how loud something feels. Lower numbers are quieter. Studio aims everything at −14 LUFS.

What happens on import

Every file you upload is listened to, end to end, when it is imported. Studio works out how loud it feels and stores the correction needed to bring it to target — *play this 5 dB quieter*, *play this 2 dB louder*.

You never see this and you do not need to do anything with it. It travels with the track and is applied the moment it airs. A track mastered loud comes down, a quiet one comes up, and both sit at the same level next to each other.

This is why your library can contain files from a dozen sources, mastered in a dozen decades, and still sound like one station.

If you replace a file, re-import it — the measurement belongs to the audio, so new audio needs a new measurement.

The safety net

After the corrections, one more stage catches anything still trying to go over the top.

It matters more than it sounds. Some files arrive already over the ceiling — mastered hot by whoever made them, clipped before Studio ever sees them. And a single mistyped number in a volume box is otherwise the difference between a lift and a very unpleasant noise. The limiter holds both back. On everything that behaves, you will never hear it working.

External streams: the one dial you set

A weather bulletin or news feed fetched from somebody else's URL is the exception, and for a simple reason: the file is replaced every hour. A measurement taken today would describe yesterday's bulletin.

So External Streams carry a Volume adjustment in dB that you set once, by ear, and it applies to whatever arrives at that address from then on.

Test playback plays through that dial, so what you hear in the dashboard is what listeners will hear. Change the number while it plays and the level moves with it.

Underneath, Studio also tells you whether the number is safe:

Loudest point so far: −9.1 dBFS. +6 dB fits, with 3.1 dB still to spare.

or

Loudest point so far: −2.9 dBFS. +4 dB overshoots it by 1.1 dB — the peaks would be clipped flat, which sounds harsh and cannot be undone.

That is the file's own headroom measured as it plays, which is the one thing your ears cannot tell you. Let the whole bulletin play before trusting it — the reading is the loudest point *so far*, and the loudest word is often the sign-off.

When something still sounds wrong

A bulletin sounds quiet, and turning it up does nothing. Check what is playing next to it before adjusting the bulletin. A jingle mastered far too loud makes everything after it sound timid, and the fix is the jingle, not the bulletin. If the bulletin is genuinely below target, a few dB is right; if you find yourself reaching for more than about +6, the source needs re-recording rather than amplifying.

The whole station feels quieter than it used to. That is levelling working. Most libraries sit above target, so most files come down. The right correction is at the very end — turn up the encoder that feeds your listeners, once — rather than pushing individual files back up and undoing the evenness you just gained.

One track still sticks out. Its measurement may predate the file. Re-import it from the Media Library and it will be measured again.

Something sounds harsh or crunchy. That is clipping, and it is almost always a volume adjustment set past the file's headroom. Play it back in the dashboard and read the line under the player; if it is red, that is your answer.

What you do not have to do

You do not need to normalise files before uploading. You do not need to match levels by hand, keep a "loud" and a "quiet" playlist, or ride anything. Upload the audio as it comes and let the measurement do the work — that is what it is for.