Drop a video or audio file
MP4, MOV, WebM, MP3, WAV or M4A. The file is read on this page and never uploaded.
Why -14 LUFS
YouTube, Spotify and most short-video apps play everything at about the same loudness. A video mixed louder than -14 LUFS is turned down, and a quieter one plays quieter than the videos around it, so a quiet Short sounds weak next to the one before it in the feed.
LUFS measures loudness the way people hear it: it weights the frequencies the ear is most sensitive to and ignores the silence between sentences. Integrated loudness is the figure over the whole file, which is what platforms level by.
Reading the result
- Integrated loudness: the whole file in LUFS. -14 is the common target for online video.
- True peak: the loudest point, including between samples. Keep it under -1 dBTP so encoding to AAC or Opus doesn't distort it.
- Change to match: how many decibels to raise (+) or lower (-) the file for each platform.
Level it in one step
Level it to -14 LUFS opens your file in the Cuecaps studio with Normalize volume on. It measures the same way as this page, raises or lowers the sound to -14 LUFS and keeps every peak under -1 dBTP with a limiter as the video exports, captions included. It is part of Fast edit.
Questions
Is my video uploaded?
No. Your browser decodes the sound and the page measures it there. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Which loudness should a podcast be?
-16 LUFS is Apple's recommendation for spoken word, and -14 LUFS suits Spotify and video podcasts on YouTube.
Does it measure the same as my editor?
Yes for integrated loudness: it follows ITU-R BS.1770, as the loudness meters in Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve and Audition do, so the figures agree within a few tenths.