What is LUFS and Why Is It Important for Your Podcast?

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And now, this week's episode.

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When it comes to the listening experience of your podcast,

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it's important to understand LUFS

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and why you need to use the correct one.

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So what is LUFS?

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Well LUFS stands for Loudness Units Full Scale

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and basically it's a standardised way of measuring loudness.

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Now I won't get too technical on this

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but basically there's two types of LUFS,

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short term and integrated.

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Short term gives us a peak reading

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of the last three seconds of audio

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while integrated is an average of the whole audio mix.

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And it's how we measure loudness for film,

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music streaming, radio and podcasting.

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To get an idea of how important LUFS is,

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ask yourself if you've ever listened to an episode

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and the ads have been much louder than the episode audio itself or vice versa.

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Ideally you want every part of your episode at the same level.

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Whether that's you and a guest, your ads, your intro, your outro etc.

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It makes it a lot more comfortable to listen back to.

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Generally there are two settings to work by.

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-16 LUFS for stereo and -19 LUFS for mono.

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Now a lot of editing software has LUFS settings built in.

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I use Hindenburg Pro for example and when I export the audio I can set it to -16.

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and I do this for all my ads, sponsor messages, intro, outro, music and more.

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This ensures that every part of my audio is exactly the same level.

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There's some great resources for LUFS,

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including a detailed explanation of what they are and how to use them,

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and I'll leave links to those in the episode show notes,

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so be sure to check them out too.

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Until the next time, happy podcasting.

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