Hi Joe I'm enjoying working my way through your comprehensive Audio & Sound Basics courses. I thought I had a good basic knowledge of the topic but there's been a ton of stuff that I wasn't aware of or had skipped over (Always wondered what Panning Law was!) I always find the discussion about recording/mixing/mastering levels of interest and your recommendation to record at line level (-20 dbFS) is very helpful. My question is more related to levels for mixing and mastering and you may cover it later in the courses (there's a lot to go through) but when, if ever do you use LUFS as an alternative to RMS and Peak? I'm aware that it's very common for mastering, especially when mastering for online services that normalise at a fixed level but do you use it for mixing or even tracking? Personally I find it a bit confusing switching from dbFS to LUFS and I'm not sure my mixing and mastering has really improved since I tried to adopt it but that may just be my ignorance of the finer details. As I say, if you cover this in a later course please just point me in the right direction but otherwise, I'd appreciate your views on using LUFS throughout the recording process. Cheers Steve p.s. I first got introduced to LUFS through an excellent series on SOS by Ian Shephard (productionadvice.co.uk). If you've not seen/heard his blogs and podcasts, I'd definitely recommend them

Hi Steve - LUFS is specifically intended for measuring the overall average level of audio, when that audio will be streamed online by one of the streaming services. When preparing a file to be sent to a streaming service, that's when you'd want to take a LUFS measurement, and adjust the level of the file to match the maximum level specified by the streaming platform [typically around -14LUFS, for music]. Otherwise, when tracking and mixing, just use the usual dBfs levels for setting input/recording levels and overall mix levels.

Yes, that's how I understand LUFS I (integrated) to be used but what about LUFS S (short term) or LUFS M (momentary) which measure over a much shorter period. I think they are alternatives to RMS and peak. Have you ever made use of them? Steve

Momentary & Short Term are designed for longer post production audio, like a film or tv program, where they can provide more information about occasional jumps in level in a file that consist of long sections of mostly consistent average level, which the occasional jolt [explosion, etc]. As I understand it, broadcast regulation standards may require an audio file to conform to maximum settings for those measurements as well as the overall Integrated level. AFAIK, streaming music files [shorter song files] only require matching the Integrated level.

Interesting...I'll revisit my notes about LUFS and see if I've misunderstood how it should be used! Thanks for your feedback, Joe