
Loudness Penalty: Find out if audio will be turned down by streaming services - zdw
http://www.loudnesspenalty.com
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janwh
Interesting idea, but personally I like the Dynamic Range (DR) measurement
developed by the Pleasurize Music Foundation more. It also provides a one-
value output that has a direct relation to the statistics of the input audio,
and AFAIK it is a somewhat established measurand in audio engineering.

Self-plug: A while back I reverse-engineered the DR algorithm and implemented
it as a Python script. It's [DRmeter on
GitHub]([https://github.com/janw/drmeter](https://github.com/janw/drmeter)).

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kstenerud
Is that similar to what replaygain uses for adjusting loudness?

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janwh
TIL of ReplayGain, thanks!

From what I quickly gathered from the specs^1, Replay Gain (RG) and Dymanic
Range (DR) are indeed similar in the grand scheme of things. Both algorithms
employ percentile-based statistic of RMS values. While RG is determined by the
95% percentile of RMS values on 50ms audio frames, DR uses the 80% percentile
on 3-second-long audio frame RMS values. So RG is definitely on the side of
short-term analysis, while DR is long-term.

What differentiates RG more plainly though is its stronger psycho-acoustical
foundation in regards to frequency response: It applies a so-called "Loudness
filter" (modelled after the Equal-Loudness contour^2 found in human hearing)
before doing the RMS statistics. The Equal-Loudness contour (also known as
"Isophone" where I come from) is in turn modelled after non-linear response of
the ear to sound pressure levels in relation to the frequency. It basically
adjusts for what in layman's terms I'd call "Importance" of the different
ranges.

Therefore I'd say RG is very much focused on what human hearing will
_perceive_ as loud (too loud, or just loud enough), while DR focuses on
"exposing offenders in all ranges of the spectrum". My educated guess would
be: Loud bassy sounds would not harm an RG score, while having a significant
impact on the DR, as its not attenuating low frequencies.

Would be interesting to see a comparison of the two!

[1]:
[http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=ReplayGain_specif...](http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=ReplayGain_specification)

[2]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-
loudness_contour](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-loudness_contour)

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hamburglar
Ironic that Spotify will apparently penalize the music for being "too loud"
when their ads are regularly ear-splittingly loud. It's egregious. When
listening with earbuds, I have to have a quick reaction on the volume control
because the commercials literally hurt my ears.

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saltypal
Have you considered that this may be by design? Have you considered paying for
the service?

~~~
hamburglar
Of course it's by design. And sure, I've considered paying for it, but I
don't. Does that mean my complaints about the free service are somehow
invalid? I'm still a customer, just a different kind of customer, and if they
make the experience bad enough for me that I avoid it in some circumstances,
that's relevant to their interests. If they didn't want free-tier customers,
they wouldn't be offering the free-tier service.

~~~
ggg9990
The free tier is to get paid users. If you have no chance of being paid,
Spotify hardly cares whether you stay or go.

~~~
QasimK
I’m sure Spotify would rather everyone that isn’t going to pay use their free
product than move to competitor X.

~~~
viraptor
Pros: they potentially play the Spotify ad to their friends, effectively
advertising the service.

Cons: each playback means bandwidth + royalties cost.

So the question is, does the probability times the return from their friends
bring more money than the free playbacks? I'd really like to know the answer.

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p1mrx
It's hard to trust a service like this without some information on where they
pull the numbers from. How did they determine which normalization algorithm
each service uses?

The "give us your email address for more information" part also seems slimy.

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ikerr
TIDAL has openly said that they are using -14 LUFS for normalization while
Spotify has said they are using ReplayGain. The other platforms required more
investigation, and we're continuing to refine the estimates, but we feel that
we've gotten pretty close.

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rcthompson
I'm confused about why this website is using the word "penalty" to describe
the process of normalizing songs to have the same loudness.

~~~
jtbayly
From the email they sent when I put in a sample song and asked for the more
detailed analysis:

"Since streaming services are going to turn loud music down anyway, more and
more people are deciding they would prefer to take control of this process
themselves, and optimize their music for the best possible results."

and

"We recommend avoiding very large negative LP values, especially on YouTube
because songs like this often sound “smaller” than those with LP scores closer
to zero.

Hear it for yourself For example, compare the loud sections of these two
Metallica songs on YouTube - The Day That Never Comes (LP -5.8)[1] and
Hardwired (LP -2.4)[2]. Which has more impact?

Loudness normalization means you have the opportunity to make your music sound
better, too. In our experience, LP between 0 and -2 on YouTube will work well
for even the loudest genres. For example, Drake’s recent hit God’s Plan has a
score of LP -0.8 on YouTube, and it sounds huge."

[1]: [https://youtu.be/dkNfNR1WYMY](https://youtu.be/dkNfNR1WYMY) [2]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhBHL3v4d3I&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhBHL3v4d3I&feature=youtu.be)
[3]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpVfcZ0ZcFM&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpVfcZ0ZcFM&feature=youtu.be)

~~~
oldcynic
Ironic you pick on Metallica as example as they basically "won" the loudness
wars[0] with the release of Death Magnetic. So ridiculously overblown and
compressed that it was clipping constantly and heavily featured in mainstream
media. Even one of the album's mastering engineers complained.

Lars thought it was great.

[0] [http://recordinghacks.com/2008/12/20/metallica-wins-the-
loud...](http://recordinghacks.com/2008/12/20/metallica-wins-the-loudness-
wars/)

~~~
jtbayly
Just to be clear, it is the site authors who wrote that about the two
Metallica songs, not me.

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acd
For background there was a loudness war/race as has been an increasing
tendency to increase loudness of music songs and by so removing dynamic range.

Background article on Loudness Race
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war)

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stephengillie
Wasn't YouTube supposed to do this a few years ago?[0] Yet some videos at full
volume are still quieter than other videos at 10% volume. Does it not work?

[0][http://productionadvice.co.uk/youtube-
loudness/](http://productionadvice.co.uk/youtube-loudness/)

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nkozyra
This is about automatic volume reduction, not normalization. In other words,
YouTube isn't going to adjust your volume up, only down if it's too loud (or
saturated?)

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amelius
Why do audio formats use a linear scale, instead of exponential (like our ears
seems to use)?

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jtbayly
I'm not sure what you are referring to with audio "formats," but audio
_programs_ work in dB, which is logarithmic.

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wl
Audio is commonly represented in a format called pulse code modulation (PCM),
where the amplitude of the sound is recorded using an integer or a floating
point number (a "sample") anywhere from 12,000 to 192,000 times a second. Each
sample is usually linearly proportional to amplitude rather than
logarithmically.

I am unaware of any audio program which internally represents audio in dB.
Waveform displays default to linear scales, though logarithmic scaling is
usually available. Just about the only place where logarithmic scales are the
default is frequency domain graphical representations like spectrograms.

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namibj
Actually 32bit float is such a logarithmic format.

