So I find myself in the ordeal of learning how mix and master my own tracks bc I´m broke, little gear, no room treatment but good headphones. I want to release them even knowing that nowadays little money is out there to be made in some genres.

Most of the songs I like and use for reference track doesn´t care about LUFS, or true peak. So i´m starting to feel insecure. It really doesn´t matter?. It´s all reduced to "if it sounds good to you then, hohoho, that´s it?"

Thanks in advance.

 

it's important, but it's not the end-all-be-all either. you at least want perceived loudness comparable to other tracks of the type/genre.

I think you are just getting a better grasp of the importance of choosing really good reference tracks.

 

1) -14LUFS is not a target! It's an annoying misconception among "producers" of today. All music/genres/styles have different loudness and different dynamic progression. Some is -4LUFS and some is -16LUFS. There is no target. The "average" is set by the streaming platforms (around -14LUFSi) but many people think THEY should get their music to be that level. Nonsense.
https://dr.loudness-war.info/
It's not that they don't "care" about loudness. They care to make the music sound as good as it can, at the loudness the music (or in less ideal situations, the artist/label) wants to be.

2) Not only does overs/ISP occur, but also added info/volume during the conversion between lossless to lossy. Most mastering engineers know about this ofc, but they rather have 0.2dB of headroom if it makes the label/artist/audience happy (yes, there can be up to 1.5dB of added ISP/overs and lossy crap added during conversion), clipping any consumer/smartphone converter.

 

Last edited: Jul 4, 2021

Depends per song, also you're not looking at the whole playback chain. Loud songs may be turned down ON PLAYBACK on the platform (via metadata) , so if you : " download" the song you can't see its effect.

See also https://www.loudnesspenalty.com/

 

Do you still need true peak, antialiasing and dithering nuances, if the sound got broken after/by mp3 codecs? It is the most popular codec. Consumers mostly know only mp3 nowadays, and know nothing about this disadvantages in sound etc. Nobody cares.
It is actual for lossless only and hiRes (true peak, dithering, 24 bit, 32-64 bit float etc, ceiling output level, huge samplerates etc).... Sometimes people even don't know their HiRes audio contains mp3 compressed samples used during production.... Or 96kHz tracks eith 44100Hz samples, or 32 bit files with 16bit undithered samples....
HiRes, lossless is just maximums/limits of what it can contain, but what is inside is another question....
LUFS ok.... Everybody wants it louder.... I want it loud on my mobile phone with my headphones, because this is quiet sounding.... But overlimiting, squashing, overclipping can be too destructive..... There should be something between optimum and "maximum before distortions are too loud" and some dynamics.... But it is also genre-oriented, specific.... EDM vs ballad vs jazz vs pop vs metalrock vs symphonic/classic vs trap dubstep etc vs etc