Even if you’ve been producing audio for a few years you might be thinking: “ huuuuuh…?”.īy now you’ve probably heard about the loudness war, and we all know what it sounds like when audio “peaks”, “clips” or hits the “red zone”. A customer might tell you: “ we need a track with an integrated loudness of -23 LUFS, a dynamic range of ≤ 15 LU and a true peak of max -1 dBTP”. However, hopefully this summer (depending on getting a job), I want to replace my Panasonic system with an amp + bookshelf speakers and possibly get a cheap USB DAC (or utilise the optical output in MBP), and get some better canalphones/headphones + portable amp for my iPod.What the heck is dBFS, true peak, RMS, integrated loudness and LUFS? Why do I need to know these strange appellations?Īs a professional sound designer you will eventually stumble across technical terms referring to audio levels and loudness.

But, since the Lossless tracks are much louder than the normalised MP3s, it is a bit of a pain having to adjust the volume, especially on my iPod using canalphones and the track is louder.Īt the moment, I do not have 'good' enough equipment to tell the difference between MP3 and lossless (main setup is MacBook Pro using integrated audio headphone output to a Panasonic SC-PM17 mini system aux input, portable setup is a 160GB iPod Classic with JVC Marshmallows).

However, recently I was experimenting with different bit rates and lossless encoding and was considering using the ALAC albums in my library along with MP3 music that I have previously ripped and do not have the CD or a lossless copy.

All of my MP3s are normalised (using MacMP3Gain) so they all sound the same level. I rip my CDs to Apple Lossless (via iTunes), but can convert to other lossless formats to normalise, then convert back to ALAC for my iTunes library.Īt the moment, I store my lossless albums on an external hard drive, and convert a copy to 320kbps MP3 for my main iTunes library to transfer to my iPod and mobile phones. If so, what software can be used (I use a Mac) to do this? I was wondering, is it possible to normalise lossless files?

Lufs for audio mp3 mac