Production Advice in UK started by writing an article about how Spotify is limiting all the music on their website to “equal out levels”. The article was actually orginally called “How Spotify is contributing to the Loudness War”.

After some more research and correction, he quickly changed the article to reflect on how Spotify is trying to destroy the loudness wars.

They’re doing this by putting a low-level normalizer (not a bad thing when used sparingly) to equal out all songs. This makes sure that every song plays back at roughly the same volume, negating the need for overcompression in mixing and mastering stages.

If this continues, there’s no reason to destroy a mix to be the loudest on the radio, and this is great news for music makers, and especially, our ears.

As technology develops towards alternative radios in the car, such as Satellite radio, and, in my opinion, internet radio, this will help to destroy the Loudness War.

The war hasn’t been won, but this is a great battle won due to Spotify’s rising success, and current media presence.

Spotify’s “Volume Normalisation” works exactly as advertised, and doesn’t add any unnecessary limiting to already high-level tracks. This feature is a great thing, in my opinion, and hopefully in the long term will help make the “Loudness Wars“ irrelevant.

Read the full article (and subsequent corrections) at Production Advice

Technorati Tags: Loudness Wars

 Print This Post

This entry was posted on Monday, October 5th, 2009 at 9:13 am and is filed under Loudness Wars. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.