YouTube loudness checker

How loud is it, and what will YouTube do about it?

YouTube turns loud videos down so viewers aren’t blasted between them. Drop in your export to see its loudness and true peak, measured the way broadcast meters measure it (ITU-R BS.1770), and how much YouTube will turn it down, or whether it’ll play quieter than everything around it. The file is measured in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.

Drop your video or audio export here

MP4, MOV, MP3, WAV and AIFF at any size: only the audio is read. Other formats (WebM, FLAC…) up to 64 MB. Measured in your browser; nothing is uploaded.

What YouTube actually does

YouTube measures every upload and, at playback, turns down anything louder than its reference, around −14 LUFS. It does not turn quiet videos up. So a −9 LUFS upload plays about 5 dB quieter than you mastered it, and a −20 LUFS upload plays at −20, noticeably quieter than the video before it. The adjustment is made by the player at playback; it isn’t baked into your file.

YouTube has never published the figure. −14 LUFS is what engineers and creators have measured, consistently, for years, and it matches Spotify’s published target. It’s close, not exact: YouTube’s own measurement isn’t documented and may differ from BS.1770 by a fraction of a dB.

Checking it on a live video

Right-click a playing video and choose Stats for nerds. The volume line shows the player volume, the normalised playback level, and the content loudness: how far above the reference YouTube measured the video. A content loudness of 4 dB means YouTube is playing it 4 dB down. A negative figure means it’s quieter than the reference and playing at its own level.

So what should you aim for?

Not −14 to the decimal. Anything louder than about −14 LUFS is turned down to −14, so extra loudness buys nothing. If it came from heavy limiting, it cost punch and clarity for no gain. Much quieter than −14, and your video drops in level next to the ones around it, because YouTube won’t raise it. Somewhere around −14 to −16 LUFS integrated, with true peak below −1 dBTP (the usual ceiling for anything that will be re-encoded to a lossy format, which every upload is), plays as intended almost everywhere.

Speech-led videos are often better judged by the voice than the whole mix: if the dialogue sits well and the integrated figure is near −14, it’s fine, even if music beds or effects are louder or quieter in places.

How it’s measured

Integrated loudness follows ITU-R BS.1770-4 with EBU R128 gating, and is checked against the EBU’s own conformance tests (Tech 3341 and 3342) and against ffmpeg on real material. True peak is measured 4× oversampled. MP4, MOV, MP3, WAV and AIFF are read directly, and only the audio is read from them, so a long 4K export is quick to measure. AAC and MP3 audio is decoded by your browser.