Loudness Metering and Streaming Delivery

This module ends where most electronic releases actually end: bouncing a finished master from your DAW and uploading it to a distributor, knowing exactly how it will survive Spotify’s pipeline. For a live coder or bedroom producer releasing a techno or ambient track, this is the last unglamorous step where good work gets silently damaged — a hot master turned down and left sounding flat, or a quiet one that can never be lifted to target because its peaks sit at 0 dBFS.

The arc starts with reading. First internalize why equal peaks never mean equal loudness (the mismatch that drove the loudness war) and why VU-style averaging and DAW sample-peak meters tell different, incomplete stories. Then move to the trap those meters share: the reconstructed waveform can clip between samples, which is why an oversampling True-Peak meter — and a -1 dBTP ceiling — exists at all. A supported first exercise is metering an existing track: log its integrated LUFS and True Peak against Spotify’s -14 LUFS playback target and its -1/-2 dBTP ceiling rules. From there, the unsupported capstone asks you to deliver your own master, reasoning through the positive-gain true-peak constraint to confirm normalization helps rather than hurts you.

Every required atom is load-bearing: the meter-literacy atoms gate the measurement step, the Spotify spec atoms gate the ceiling and target decisions, and the playback-normalization atoms (including the playback-only, file-untouched misconception) gate the written justification for restraint. The supporting atoms enrich that justification — loudness-war history, hypercompression’s irreversibility, and the level-matched A/B procedure that lets you hear what maximization costs — without being needed to complete the delivery itself.

Runnable examples

Generated from the context/ instrument corpus by concept (redistributable idioms only). Do not edit — regenerate with gen-module-examples.mjs.

gain-staging

(saw 110) * dbamp (-12) >> audio

_{punctual-0010 · CC0-1.0}

SinOsc s => Dyno d => dac; d.limit();

_{chuck-0028 · MIT}