Ian Shepherd's Loudness Penalty Plugin

Hey friends,

I found his article and video useful - and maybe you'd like to have a look at the free webpage he mentions. I've tried my latest upload, and it was very nicely within the limits...

Ok, without further ado, here's the link to Ian:

http://productionadvice.co.uk/loudness-penalty-plugin/

Enjoy,
and cheers,
Wolfgang

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Very interesting, Wolfgang. I'll be checking that out on my next recordings. Anything that helps frighten the mastering world into stepping back from these ludicrous 'gain wars' in an effort to be louder than everyone else clearly gets my vote.

You'd think, given digital's total intolerance of distortion, these wars wouldn't happen because - in my opinion - dynamic headroom is surely king because these days you don't have to worry about optimised signal ratios due to background hiss.

But if the streaming world is basically penalising aggressive mastering, perhaps they're doing some good after all!

Hopefully they'll apply the same logic to TV adverts next!

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I think ads on TV and radio were the main reasons for the EBU to implement something like their R128 recommendation. See

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LKFS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Broadcasting_Union and
https://tech.ebu.ch/docs/r/r128.pdf

for more info on that. And yes, everyone woke up because of these annoying ads already, it's time to stop that nonsense :)

Cheers,
Wolfgang

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ive just gone back to "gain staging" like in the old analogue days... so through the whole chain I never peak above -12 db... and I now only allow the output bus to ride at max -5 db... so always loads of headroom for everyone else.... including the mastering engineer! :D

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