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Drum hits, one-shots, a few loops. Open in any DAW.Streaming platforms normalise to roughly -14 LUFS integrated. Here is the chain we use, the ceiling we set, and what you should leave alone on import.
Every track in the SONICHAOS catalog ships at -14 LUFS integrated, with the true-peak ceiling sitting at -1.0 dBTP. The number is not arbitrary, and the chain that gets us there is not a secret. This post walks the full path from raw stems to the WAV you download, explains why the target is what it is, and ends with a small list of edits you should not redo on import.
LUFS stands for Loudness Units relative to Full Scale. The integrated measurement averages the loudness of the entire programme, gated against silence so a quiet intro does not pull the number down. Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, and TikTok all normalise to a target near -14 LUFS for most listeners. Push your master to -8 and the platform turns it down. Land at -22 and the platform pushes it up, surfacing tape hiss and pre-amp noise that you would rather keep buried.
The practical consequence: there is no loudness war on streaming. There is only a target, and a true-peak ceiling that protects against inter-sample peaks on the consumer's lossy decoder.
Each contributor's bounce arrives as a 24-bit, 48 kHz WAV. The lab pipeline runs three passes on that file before it lands in the catalog:
Integrated loudness lands at -14.0 LUFS ±0.3. Short-term loudness is allowed to swing freely; we do not flatten dynamics for their own sake. A trailer cue still hits.
Three rules govern the chain:
The combination matters. You can run any one of these three rules and still ship a busy master. Running all three gives you headroom for transients without sacrificing the perceived loudness budget.
Every download writes a license receipt as a PDF, ed25519-signed against the asset_id and the time of download. The receipt records the loudness target and the ceiling. If a client asks why a cue sounds quieter than a reference they sent you, the receipt is the audit trail.
This is the part most working creators get wrong: they treat a SONICHAOS track like a raw stem and slap a master-bus chain over it. Don't.
If you absolutely have to lift the cue under a louder bed, group the cue with the rest of your music and master the group, not the cue alone.
Two cases pull the target somewhere other than -14 LUFS:
Both bundles are flagged on the track detail page. The default download is streaming-targeted; the alternates are one click away.
Will Spotify still turn my video down? Spotify normalises audio in the Spotify app. YouTube normalises in the YouTube player. Your video on someone else's site is at the loudness you mastered it to. Match the bed to the dialogue level your editor uses, then trust the platform.
Do I need a true-peak meter? Yes, if you are mastering anything yourself. The free options are good enough: youlean Loudness Meter, Voxengo SPAN Plus. Set the ceiling at -1.0 dBTP and the integrated target at -14 LUFS for streaming.
What about loudness for ads? US TV ads spec CALM Act compliance: -24 LUFS integrated, +/- 2. Online video ads on most platforms target somewhere between -16 and -14 LUFS. Spec varies by platform; the safest approach is to match the surrounding content's level rather than chase a number.
The catalog page for each track lists the loudness, the ceiling, the sample rate, and the bit depth. None of those need to be guessed.
Browse the catalog and the loudness target is on every detail page.