Loudness (LUFS)

Last updated: 8 March 2023

You may have noticed having to turn up the volume to listen to a particular podcast but then have your ears blasted when you receive a phone notification or your player moves onto the next episode in the queue. By adhering to loudness standards you are protecting your listeners’ hearing and ensuring a consistent and pleasant experience. Arguably getting loudness correct is more important for podcasters than say TV producers due to the fact that most people are listening to podcasts with headphones/earbuds and often the volume has to be louder to compensate for noisy environments. Therefore audio that is too quiet can be more damaging than audio that is too high.

LUFS (also known as LKFS) is a way of measuring average audio levels using the decibel (dB) scale. There have been several mechanisms used to gauge the loudness of an audio track over the years. Just taking the “True Peak” value is not representative and is easily biassed, RMS (Root Mean Square) is better as it averages over the time period but is still heavily influenced by things like gaps of silence. LUFS goes a step further and aims to represent loudness in a way that humans perceive it. It has been adopted across TV, film, music, and radio stations for many decades now.

Apple is the dominant authority when it comes to podcast standards and recommends “-16 dB LKFS [LUFS], with a +/- 1 dB tolerance”. Factoring in the tolerance, our recommended range is -17 to -15 LUFS.

Most DAWs have a filter to alter volume to a chosen LUFS target. We’ll show you how to make this adjustment using the most popular tools. We’ll be updating this page with more solutions as time goes on and we figure them all out ourselves. If you tool isn’t listed here and you know it supports this feature, please let us know so we can add it.

Audacity

LUFS Loudness Normalisation is a relatively recent effect added to Audacity in June 2020 so you may need to upgrade if you have an old version. You’ll need version 2.4.1 or above to use it.

First select your track(s) then from the top menu choose “Effects” and then “Loudness Normalization”. A dialogue will appear. Select “perceived loudness” from the dropdown options and enter “-16” as the LUFS value for podcasts.

You can read more in Audacity’s own documentation for the feature.

Logic Pro

• Sound Advice — Normalising in Logic Pro X
• Mikael Baggström — Normalize Audio Clips in Logic Pro X (Tutorial)

Reaper

• REAPER Mania — Setting the LUFS Level in REAPER
• REAPER Mania — Render Normalization in REAPER

Adobe Audition

• Mike Russell — How to Even Out Volume Levels with Normalize and Speech Volume Leveler - Adobe Audition Tutorial

DaVinci Resolve

• Curtis Judd — Understanding How to Loudness Normalize Your Audio for Video

Header photo: Jonathan Taylor