Check a track against -16 LUFS
Drop an audio file and read its integrated loudness against the -16 LUFS figure Apple Music normalises towards. The number beside the target is the gain change that would land the file exactly on it.
Two decibels below the streaming norm
Apple sits at -16 LUFS where Spotify, YouTube, and Amazon sit at -14. The same master is therefore turned down 2 dB further here, and a track mastered to hit -14 precisely will simply play 2 dB quieter relative to its own peaks on Apple Music.
That difference is not worth a separate master. Each platform applies its own gain to whatever it is given, so one file with honest dynamics and controlled peaks behaves correctly on all of them.
Headroom and true peak
The meter oversamples 4x to find the true peak, since the continuous waveform a converter reconstructs between samples can rise above the highest stored sample. A file reading -0.1 dBFS on samples can sit well above 0 dBTP.
Because Apple turns files down slightly further than Spotify, a master that clips after normalisation on Apple Music is clipping quite hard to begin with. The warning colour appears when the true peak would cross -1 dBTP after the gain change.
What the readings tell you
- Integrated loudness across the whole file, with both gates applied, is the figure the platform measures.
- Loudness range shows how much loudness moves across the track. Heavy limiting collapses it.
- Short term and momentary maxima find the loudest 3 second and 400 ms windows, which is where a chorus or a transient will be.
Other targets
Spotify and YouTube aim at -14 LUFS, podcasts at -16, and European broadcast at -23. To compare all four at once, use the full Loudness Meter.