music_noteFORMERLY ATLANTIC SURF RADIO

Best Practice For Radio Show Syndication Mastering

Background

What's The Secret Sauce?

As a radio station owner and programme director, over the years I have found that there are certain practices/settings that work best when producing pre-recorded radio content. I don’t profess to be a studio wizz or mastering expert, however the following suggestions have served me well. I feel if you follow these you can’t go far wrong and any station that takes your show will be forever grateful as it really helps.

Master to -14 LUFS

I know what you are thinking, what are LUFS? Well, it’s an acronym for Loudness Unit Full Scale but you don’t really need to know that. In simple terms LUFS are loudness units that give one of the most accurate ways of measuring loudness for audio played on streaming services, film, and TV. It’s all about perceived loudness. There’s nothing worse than having to constantly adjust volume for different tracks that vary in volume. Mastering in LUFS is the industry standard across streaming services to get consistent volume levels. The list below shows what the leading platforms use. The integrated means it gives you the LUFS for the entire duration of the track played and not just a small sample, again you don’t need to know that.

  • Spotify: -14 LUFS (integrated)
  • Apple Music: -16 LUFS (integrated)
  • YouTube: -14 LUFS (integrated)
  • Tidal: -14 LUFS (integrated)
  • Amazon Music: -14 LUFS (integrated)
  • Deezer: -15 LUFS (integrated)

I always master all my shows on my station to -14 LUFS, you can see from the table above that it’s the most widely used level on the big platforms and it works great for me. If you don’t already do this I can tell you first hand that it really helps a station when preparing their schedule.

How Do I Do That?

Whatever is your recording DAW of choice will let you do that and I won’t go into detail here for each one. What I will do is tell you what I do and it works great for me, not only that it’s dead easy. I record all my shows in Reaper and when you export in Reaper there is an option to export at a LUFS level of your choosing. Perfect. However a great way to do it is to use the free recording software Audacity. Now I know what you’re thinking, Audacity, what is he like eh! Bear with me, it’s free and easy mastering and works great. The screenshots below illustrate how simple it is.

Just go to Effect, Volume & Compression, Loudness & Normalisation and type in -14.0 in the LUFS field.

And that’s it. Export the file to mp3 and you’re done.

Add Meta Data

This is something else that a station owner will be forever grateful for. It takes seconds to do and can be done at the same time as when you normalise your show as discussed above.

This metadata is where the station takes the show/track name from so it’s important as it displays the show information as it plays. Great for anyone listening, as they can take a note if they like what they are hearing. Where it helps also, is for when a station reports their listening figures to the licensing authorities. This is a requirement for all internet stations and it makes it easier to identify tracks and shows for reporting purposes. As a creator you don’t really need to worry about that, but knowing that adding accurate metadata is a real help to station owners.

The screenshot below is an example for Audacity. There are many other metadata editors available, if you don’t want to use Audacity mp3tag works great also and it’s another free one.

Just go to Edit, Metadata and enter the information, then click Add then OK. As a minimum you need to complete the first three fields.

Compress The Whole Show, What!

This is a controversial one but can work great, if after recording your show you find that the level between music tracks and speech are all over the place. In an ideal world you will get consistency when recording so the show flows seamlessly between the music, the links, and the jingles etc. But what if it could be better. I’ve rescued many shows I’ve been sent using the following settings in Audacity again. If you are a studio wizz I’m sure you have your own way to get the results that you want, but for simplicity the below method can get you out of trouble.

Just go to Effect, Volume & Compression, Compressor and enter the settings below then click Apply. You only have to do that once as Audacity will remember them for next time.

Don’t worry about what it all means just be reassured that it works.

In Summary

So to summarise, adding metadata and normalising to -14 LUFS will get you in a station’s good books. If you find your show is a bit all over the place after recording, explore compressing it as described. Please reach out if you have any questions, I’m definitely not a tech guru, but I have produced, mastered and scheduled hundreds of shows for my station and these few tricks really work.

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