What Does the YouTube Loudness Standard Mean?
The majority of video and audio streaming services make sure their content isn’t too loud. They do this by normalizing, that is, reducing the volume of all audio that does not meet their loudness standards.
In addition, these platforms wish to deliver the best possible audience experience. Sometimes, most of you have had a bad experience with clipping or loud audio.
The loudness standard for YouTube is -14LUFs. However, the point is that YouTube will downscale the volume of videos that exceed that threshold.
What Happens If the Audio Is Too Loud When Uploading to YouTube?
If the audio levels in the video exceed -14LUFs, YouTube will automatically normalize the audio and decrease the loudness.
However, allowing YouTube to normalize your audio can occasionally result in some distortion of the sound when compressed. This situation should be avoided. Rather, normalize your audio before exporting it.
Optionally, you can visit loudnesspenalty.com to see if and to what extent YouTube normalizes your audio. Simply upload the video you want to post, and it will provide you with a percentage of how much the audio will be normalized on YouTube and other platforms. While this solution is mainly made for music videos, it works just as well for dialogue.
What Happens If the Audio Is Too Quiet When Uploading to YouTube?
Regrettably, the reverse is not true. If the video is too quiet, YouTube won’t take any action on your video. Thus, your only option here is to make sure the video is exported at the correct loudness before uploading.
Getting to Know LUFS
YouTube measures the volume of your audio or audio levels in LUFs, which is an abbreviation for Loudness Unit Full Scale. It’s a loudness standard designed to standardize volume levels across all video and audio streaming services.
As noted above, YouTube has a loudness standard of -14LUFs. This means that any video higher than this value will be normalized. For instance, if you upload a video at -10LUF loudness, YouTube will lower it to approximately -14LUF. Likewise, a video with a loudness of -5LUFs will be reduced to the same level.
How to Check the Audio Loudness on YouTube?
After learning about the YouTube loudness standard and LUFs, let’s see how easy it is to check the loudness of a video on YouTube and whether or not it has been normalized. This is done through the Stats for Nerds feature:
Follow the instructions below to activate Stats for Nerds on your PC:
Step 1: Open the video whose loudness you wish to check and play it.
Step 2: Right-click the video player to bring up a menu.
Step 3: Click Stats for Nerds and an overlay will come up above the video with lots of useful information.
Or, you can use the Stats for Nerds on mobile. Follow the steps below:
Step 1: Go to the YouTube app and tap on your profile icon.
Step 2: Tap on Settings and select General.
Step 3: Locate and turn on Stats for Nerds.
Step 4: Play the video whose loudness you wish to check.
Step 5: The Stats for Nerds overlay will not automatically show up. You have to tap the three-dot button in the video player and then tap on the Stats icon.
So, what do you think of all of these stats? You can focus on information about the volume of the video.
The first value is a measure of the player’s volume. The number will change if you make adjustments to the volume slider.
However, the second value measures whether and to what extent YouTube has normalized the audio of that video (depicted as a percentage).
For example, a value of 80% indicates that YouTube has normalized the audio by 20% while keeping 80% of the volume.
Finally, you can discover content loudness from there measured in decibels as well. If it displays any value above 0, it indicates YouTube has considered the clip too loud as well as normalized it.
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Conclusion
Understanding the above about YouTube loudness standard and LUFs, you should try to keep only under -14LUFs when uploading a video, with sufficient margin to be safe. Meanwhile, you can determine which videos have been normalized by using YouTube’s tool – Stats for Nerds.
About The Author
Position: Columnist
Jocelin is keeping a strong passion for the multimedia industry with her first thoughts and visions. While continuously absorbing relevant knowledge, she believes that pictures, videos, and music can bring so much pleasure to life. To go deeper into the industry, she has acquired many skills in video editing. Also, she can provide readers with ways to solve problems on image, video, and auido topics.