Welcome to Streaming-Ready Loudness Mastering.

You've just joined a course built by a working mastering engineer, designed to take you from understanding loudness theory to delivering professional, platform-compliant masters.

How This Course Works

The course is structured in 6 chapters, 18 lessons, progressing sequentially:

1. Foundations of Loudness & Metering — LUFS, true peak, platform standards, metering setup

2. Signal Chain & Monitoring — Building your chain, room calibration, reference workflows

3. EQ & Tonal Balance — Corrective vs. creative EQ, mid-side techniques, commercial matching

4. Compression & Dynamics — Glue compression, multiband problem-solving, parallel techniques

5. Limiting & Loudness Maximization — True peak limiting, multi-stage strategies, the loudness/dynamics tradeoff

6. Format Delivery & QC — Dithering, SRC, platform-specific delivery, final quality control

Every lesson includes practical exercises you should complete with real audio material. Theory without practice is worthless in mastering.

What You'll Need

• A DAW with metering capabilities

• A true peak limiter plugin

• An LUFS meter (ITU-R BS.1770 compliant)

• Calibrated monitoring (headphones at minimum)

• Reference tracks in your target genre

Community

Use the Community Chat to share your work, ask questions, and connect with other engineers going through the program.

Let's get to work. Your first lesson starts in Chapter 1.

If you've ever uploaded a master that sounded incredible in your DAW but came out flat, quiet, or harsh on Spotify — you're not alone. Here's what's actually happening.

The Normalization Problem

Spotify normalizes all audio to -14 LUFS. If your master sits at -7 LUFS (common in the loudness war era), Spotify turns it down by 7 dB. Your master now sounds quieter than a well-mastered track at -14 LUFS — and it's lost all its dynamics in the process.

The loud master gets turned down. The dynamic master plays at full resolution. The loudness war backfired.

The True Peak Problem

When Spotify encodes your WAV to Ogg Vorbis, the codec can push inter-sample peaks above 0 dBFS. If your master already sits at -0.1 dBTP, the encoded version clips. Your listeners hear distortion that doesn't exist in your session.

The fix: Set your true peak ceiling to -1.0 dBTP. Every platform. Every time.

The Three Numbers That Matter

What Most Engineers Get Wrong

1. Mastering louder than the platform target — gets turned down, sounds worse

2. Ignoring true peak — causes codec clipping on every platform

3. Not previewing the encoded version — AAC at 128 kbps sounds different than your WAV

4. Using the same loudness target for every genre — a jazz record and an EDM track require completely different approaches

These aren't advanced concepts. They're fundamentals that separate professionals from amateurs.

If you want to learn the complete process — from metering setup to final delivery for every major platform — that's exactly what this course covers across 18 hands-on lessons.

If you've ever uploaded a master that sounded incredible in your DAW but came out flat, quiet, or harsh on Spotify — you're not alone. Here's what's actually happening.

The Normalization Problem

Spotify normalizes all audio to -14 LUFS. If your master sits at -7 LUFS (common in the loudness war era), Spotify turns it down by 7 dB. Your master now sounds quieter than a well-mastered track at -14 LUFS — and it's lost all its dynamics in the process.

The loud master gets turned down. The dynamic master plays at full resolution. The loudness war backfired.

The True Peak Problem

When Spotify encodes your WAV to Ogg Vorbis, the codec can push inter-sample peaks above 0 dBFS. If your master already sits at -0.1 dBTP, the encoded version clips. Your listeners hear distortion that doesn't exist in your session.

The fix: Set your true peak ceiling to -1.0 dBTP. Every platform. Every time.

The Three Numbers That Matter

For every master you deliver:

What Most Engineers Get Wrong

1. Mastering louder than the platform target — gets turned down, sounds worse

2. Ignoring true peak — causes codec clipping on every platform

3. Not previewing the encoded version — AAC at 128 kbps sounds different than your WAV

4. Using the same loudness target for every genre — a jazz record and an EDM track require completely different approaches

These aren't advanced concepts. They're fundamentals that separate professionals from amateurs.

If you want to learn the complete process — from metering setup to final delivery for every major platform — that's exactly what this course covers across 18 hands-on lessons.