Any special suggestions for mastering songs for cd? I have been mixing for myself and friends for a few years. I had used the cd montage in Wavelab Essential for several years. Now that I have Wavelab Pro 12 I have many more options, but there is a steep learning curve so far. As far as I can tell, the LUFS settings for streaming should not apply here. However, I am using songs from some of my favorite CDs for reference.
That’s a massive subject.
You could try some online video guides, both Wavelab specific and general topics… like those from Ian Stewart, Justin Perkins WaveLab Pro Workflows with Justin Perkins #6 | EP/Album Mastering In The Audio Montage, Ian Shepherd How To Master Your Own Music - Resources and Information to Get Started NOW - Production Advice and https://themasteringshow.com/ + others.
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Thanks!
There are no rules but in my opinion there is no need to make a different LUFS level for mastering for streaming vs. CD.
The topic itself is too broad to discuss here.
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That’s generally sound advice. In terms of LUFS etc. I guess it also depends on the style and what you’re after, i.e. do you want to sound modern or do you want to use the 16 bits that CD offers 
There’s a couple of particularities when it comes to CDs, like having a little gap at the beginning of tracks (usually somewhere between 250 to 500 ms I’d say), especially with transient signals right from the start. So if you’ve never mastered for CD, you might want to research that a bit. Will also depend a bit if you’re just doing a bunch of burned CDs where it would be easy to fix stuff or if you’re actually getting a run of 300 or 500 or more CDs pressed, where you would want to make sure everything’s perfect and probably deliver a DDP image.
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I realize that the topic is too broad, and I am so new to Wavelab Pro to even know what to ask sometimes. However, I have noticed in the CD’s that I have ripped so far, that many go much higher than the -14 LUFS integrated Loudness that is recommended for streaming.
That to me seems to allow some freedom in that area as long as distortion is not introduced in the music on the CD.
I think the confusion is that nobody is recommending -14 LUFS for streaming but it has somehow become one of the great internet myths of the audio world in the last 5 to 10 years.
-14 LUFS is roughly the level that most (but not all) streaming services normalize playback levels to when Loudness Normalization is enabled in the streaming app, but ask any busy mastering engineer what would happen if they started sending out all masters at -14 LUFS and they’ll probably tell you they’d be fired on nearly all projects in the pop/rock non-classical/folk world.
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What has surprised me: if I mix and master without paying attention to LUFS, I often end up hitting -14 LUFS… If I push the levels further, I can really hear the dynamics getting compromised and/or transients disappearing. This is with indie rock and singer/songwriter with accompanying band stuff. I will get used to reduced dynamics quickly, it’s not a big deal. But for me, -14 LUFS is not just an arbitrary number. It feels natural.
My opinion, which is decidedly at odds with this line of thought, is based on three key points:
“Everyone does it this way” is not a good reason to do “this way.”
The listener has control over the volume and adjusts it as they please.
Music should sound good, not loud.
Regarding point 1 I won’t comment: it’s common sense and a personal choice that I believe each of us can freely make.
Regarding point 2 when I produce music, I consider having an active listener who is interested in the music, not a passive one.
I believe that a listener who is truly interested in the music is not passive in their listening and will therefore raise the volume to the desired level to enjoy the full dynamic expression of the song.
If, on the other hand, the listener isn’t particularly interested in the music and remains “passively listening,” I don’t think a volume a few dB louder is something that will spark interest in any case.
Regarding point 3 however Spotify’s -14 LUFS value, in my opinion, provides a good compromise between clarity and compact dynamics. Above all, it allows for real dynamic movement in the song (a chorus louder than the verse, for example) and thus greater expressive freedom than if everything were compressed to the same dynamic range from start to finish.
This doesn’t mean that compression beyond this target should be prohibited. In fact, if a song with the same LUFS sounds better with more compression, I think it’s more than fair to apply it.
The problem is applying compression in pursuit of the highest possible volume. Again, music should sound good, not loud.
I’ve spoken several times with people who know nothing about music and audio production, and I’ve found some interesting things:
No one has ever complained about music sounding soft; most of the time, their volume controller was set to the lowest settings (who knows why…) and they had plenty of room to add more volume.
Many listeners of non-streaming music (such as CDs and iPods) have complained about a lack of volume consistency between songs when listening to compilations, a problem that Spotify’s volume normalization seems to have largely solved.
Some particularly “hungry” listeners have also complained in their own way about the lack of natural dynamics within commercial tracks.
Listeners in the last point have asked me how to edit the files of these songs to make the choruses louder than the verses and the intros quieter than the rest of the song.
My experiences certainly can’t be statistically significant, but a little searching online can also reveal scientific studies that, to some extent, at least partially reflect my observations.
Hans-Joachim Maempel and Fabian Gawlik, “The influence of sound processing on listeners’ program choice in radio broadcasting,” presented at AES 126th Conventions, Munich, Germany, 2009 May 7-10.
Naomi B. H. Croghan, Kathryn H. Arehart, and James M. Kates, “Quality and loudness judgments for music subjected to compression limiting,” The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, August 2012.
For these reasons, I find Spotify’s mastering advice very valuable and plan to continue following it.
At the end of the day, compression and loudness likely have little to do with a song’s success or failure.
I think the important thing is to be aware of the possibilities, master the subject matter, and justify your choices artistically and technically.
But above all, don’t necessarily follow trends or what others are doing.
If your song needs dynamics, give it the space it needs.
If, on the other hand, it needs compression, give it the compression it needs without worrying about the final volume.
I hope everyone agrees with me on this: music should sound good, not loud.
Check this song LUFS:
This is my opinion but that said, if the client asks for a very loud product, I will do it.
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If you are mastering your own music, you can do whatever you want.
If you are mastering music for others, you can do what you want to a degree because they hired you and presumably for the previous work you’ve done, but at the end of the day the client has the final say and if they want it louder then you must oblige or risk losing the work, and other work.
I’d love to master most stuff between -14 LUFS and -9 LUFS where it feels more natural but I’d be less busy if I insisted on doing that for every project.
With ATMOS for music there actually is a loudness standard and limit you must adhere to, but with stereo music there are no standards or rules. All you have to do is disable Loudness Normalization in your streaming app and listen to some recent releases to discover that essentially nobody is mastering to -14 LUFS.
YouTube is a TERRIBLE place to reference music for audio quality and loudness because their Loudness Normalization is on by default and you can’t disable it so in pretty much all cases, the level in which something was mastered is not the level it plays back on YouTube.
Probably a topic for another forum besides this one but the main point was there is no need to make different loudness master for streaming vs. CD. If you don’t like how digital limiting sounds to make a streaming master louder than -14 LUFS, you’re not going to like how it sounds on CD either.
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That’s true Justin and I’ve said that at the end of it.