What's New in Audacity 2.4.1? The LUFS (Perceived Loudness) Effect

hey welcome to the audacity bootcamp let's talk about what's new in audacity version 2.4 dot one [Music] in audacity 2.41 one of the new features is lufs or loudness units have you heard of lufs lu FS it stands for loudness units full scale it's one of those acronyms that once you hear what it what it means what the letters stand for it's still meaningless to you doesn't really do a lot of good to know what it is well lufs is a overall loudness perceived loudness of your podcast from beginning to end in other words it's a measurement of the overall average loudness the perceived loudness of your entire file from start to finish it can be part of a file that you've selected within audacity or it can be an entire track it can be your entire podcast one of the last things that you should do as a podcast editor is raise your podcast or lower your podcast level as the case may be to the acceptable lufs standard did you know that there's left standards for podcasts if you're editing and exporting a podcast in mono the luf standard is a minus 19 laughs if you are exporting your podcast in stereo the left standard is a minus 16 left and the number before the lufs acronym is just a reference to dB so a minus 16 lufs would be an average loudness of a minus 16 DB a minus 19 left's will be an average loudness of your file of a minus 19 DB overall remember it's perceived loudness it's what your ears are hearing and perceiving to be the loudness the beautiful thing about lufs is once you level the loudness a person listening to your podcast doesn't have to chase the volume up and down to try and figure out what's being said because it'll level eise's it a little bit different than normalization normalization attempts to raise or lower the level of your podcast to whatever you've got it set at if you've got a set to peak out on a - 1 dB - 2 dB it tries to keep those Peaks there whereas lufs loudness units aren't concerned with the peak level they're concerned with the overall loudness so -19 lufs is always going to sound consistent through the entire podcast there's not going to be any high volume is not going to be any low volume it's going to make it standardized it's going to make it the same well in audacity version 2.1 we now have the ability to apply lufs to a file let me show you in this screen that I've got open I have a wave or I have a file that I brought in here which does happen to be a wave file I exported this for my zoom h6 it's about 22 minutes long it's had zero editing on it you can see that the level is low I left the level low intentionally so that we could see what happens here when we apply loudness units to it and so within audacity now with the new tool in audacity 2 dot 4.1 I now have an effect called loudness normalisation and this isn't the normalization that we're used to which is two steps down this is overall loudness normalisation it's lufs so if I click on loudness normalisation it brings up my lufs screen and in my left screen I can normalize to two different things I can normalize to perceive loudness Loess which is what I want or I can normalize to root means square which is average audio which is a different critter altogether I'm gonna leave it at perceived loudness because that's the standard that we want to set it remembers my last setting when I open this back up it knows that the last time I used it I was at a mine teen at my my teen I was at a minus nineteen lufs because I was using it on a mono file remember for mono recordings it's a minus nineteen left for stereo recordings at some minus sixteen left's perceived loudness well I usually do mine in mono and so I had it set to a minus nineteen left's now one of the things that you can do too is if you click the manage button you'll find out that there are no factory presets for lufs those may show up one day but you can create your own presets and that's what I've done I have three user presets right now I have my mono recording preset which is the one on the screen if I change it to stereo recordings you'll see that my lufs level changes to a minus sixteen it's no longer a minus nineteen and that i have checked normalized stereo channels independently in other words when I am normalizing to a lufs level to a loudness level in a stereo file it's looking at each channel individually and it's going to bring those channels up to the same -19 lufs or in this case minus sixteen lufs for consistent listening that means that your person listening to your podcast doesn't have to change that volume up and down all over the place as they're listening because a part of it went quiet and a part of it went loud lufs takes care of that problem and if you leave that normalized stereo channels independently it's going to normalize both left and right stereo channels to the same lufs level eliminating that need to chase audio levels all over the place in your podcast I've also got in my user presets I've got one for video recordings which I do a lot of this particular one is set to a - 24 lufs which is an audio setting for us video you know you got video then you got the audio pipe as part of the video - 24 is the u.s. setting for lufs the European setting is the -23 lufs I use both I go back and forth with both depending on what I'm doing and what's going on but if I hit that manage button again and I took my take my user preset back to Mono recordings let's see what it does here on this file when I click OK and you can see that it takes a couple of seconds to do its gyrations and then boom just like that I have level two my file - eh - 19 left's overall so that when I'm listening to this file it's going to be enjoyable to listen to I don't have to chase volume up and down I don't have to think well what did that guy just say over there or what did that girl just say right there I didn't catch it the volume was too low lufs level eise's that volume the overall perceived loudness of your podcast from beginning to end so that's one feature within audacity 2.4 dot one that's really a gem it now has a lufs effect so take advantage of that and use it and play around with it and see what it'll do for you until next time see ya

Channel: Learn Audacity

Views: 6,359

Keywords: audacity, podcast, audio, editing, production, compression, normalization, equalization, bootcamp, LUFS, Loudness, Perceived Loudness, Audacity 2.4.1

Id: eoFdJH2M6ZA

Length: 6min 25sec (385 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 05 2020