Setting the LUFS Level in REAPER

hi I'm Kenny Choi welcome to another one with tutorials in this video I'm gonna show you how to set the lufs level in Reaper now setting the wefts level what left stands for is without miss units relative to full scale so this basically tells us how loud our mixes or our master so I'm going to show you how to get your song to a specific level using the meters in Reaper now the whole purpose of this is for using streaming services I have a table over here but we could see the preferred level but each service uses Apple music uses -16 YouTube uses minus 13 and Spotify entitle use minus 14 at this point SoundCloud doesn't really use a level but that may change over time but the purpose of this setting is that these services will turn down your music if you create them too loud so if you use a limiter or a clipper to really push to make you track louder it's not going to really be louder on their services because they're just gonna turn them down or make them quieter to these levels right here but the one thing they don't do is they don't turn them up so if your mix or your master is too quiet it's still gonna be quiet on those services so you might want to bring it up or make it louder for that purpose but what I really want to show you is how to create that level in Reaper so track in front of me here they're about to mix down and if I want to see the level of it in terms of lufs or Lu FS we could do that on the Master meter so let's go to the View menu right here and open up the 40 mixer master this is where all of our tracks are being mixed to while mixing through in their final stage and we can see right now I have a few plugins already on there I have a compressor to compress it a bit another compressor right after it and then finally I have a limiter which is not really set to do any limiting it's just making sure there's no overs with the ceiling set like this but if I bring this down I'm gonna make it louder but we don't want to bring it down and make it louder unless we have to that's why we look at the meter to see what level were actually using but we first have to customize the meter so let's go to the meter and right-click it that opens up this dialogue we can adjust the meter to get the proper lufs level so let's change this from peak and RMS to just rms which is more a constant level then we'll change this to RMS as well we'll leave the window size alone then we have the display offset this is what we're gonna set the lufs level that we want so if we went 14 we'll just keep it there we'll leave this the same and we'll turn off this little window right here we don't really need to see that range but set it to zero so now on the meter is just a line so now if we close it and our music goes right to this line it's going to be 14 Bluffs based on the setting right here so let's see what it is right now [Music] we could see it's a bit lower we can see the readout better if I use a third-party plugin like this one right here do you lean loudest meaner let's reset it and watch the number right here so it's about sixteen lufs so let's turn down the threshold on the limiter which will make it louder until it reaches this line which once again should be 14 loves [Music] it looks pretty good right there let's reset this that's about minus 14 goes right to that line now let's say you want to use minus 13 that's at YouTube is using so if you want to set it a bit hotter and go to minus 13 we just change it right in here right click and change this to 13 so we'll bring down our threshold until it reaches this line we can see right here it's about minus 13 and it's just hitting that line now for this mix or this master it's now minus 13 Bluffs so if we send this mix to YouTube it's not going to turn it down it's gonna keep it at about the same level and if someone else's mix is louder than yours they're gonna be turned down to match yours so there's no real point of going any louder than this but if you go too low you mix will be quieter than other ones so you probably want to shoot for round minus 14 or minus 13 now they give you an example of what YouTube does let's check out a popular song now here's a song by Bruno Mars and if you want to see the level of it we just right-click and go down here to stats for nerds that opens up this window where we could see what's going on check out the volume and normalised will see it this mix he's only being played back at 68% so youtube actually lowered it so it's the same level as other songs on the service we can see right here and brought it down 3.4 dB so this mix has been lowered but like I said if you shoot for 13 or 14 it's not gonna lower it and there's no point of going any hotter than that level there's one other thing I do want to show you when you're done with you mix there's a great application to double check the level you have so if you go to Google and search our 128 Beck's that's going to bring up this application we could download right over here an application to check your final mix choose this one right here that'll go back to Reaper and I'll render this mix will go to the file menu and choose render Oh use a wave file 16-bit and I'll save it as lufs meter ring so I render it down or render the final mix then I'm gonna open the application we downloaded right here and drag this file into it and right over here we could see the lufs level the loudness range and if we went over or clipped which we didn't do but this is the level we really care about the lufs level like I said if we sent this to YouTube it's not going to turn it down but if we sent it to Spotify or title don't turn it down a bit so somewhere between 13 and 14 is your perfect level and by right-clicking this meter and setting up like this with the left's level you want right here it'll change your meter with a little wine like this so you can get your level perfect for the streaming service you choose and once again it's about minus 14 plus so that's pretty much it that's setting the lufs level or the loudness units relative to full scale in Reaper I hope you learned something I hope you can use it and I'll see you next time Thanks [Music] you

Channel: REAPER Mania

Views: 89,254

Rating: 4.9147515 out of 5

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Id: 0wPnlND92QU

Length: 9min 23sec (563 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 30 2018