One of the 'pet hates' of the professionals in the media is poor control of audio levels. By this I mean the final VU level that a track is mastered at, and the peak levels contained within that average VU level.. In my years in commercial TV and radio the operators would tweak and adjust to try and help the supplied material sound reasonable on air, however all too often what was broadcast IMHO was carp. Not Flake or Barra, nah, it was carp...

While metering these days in the world of the 'home studio' is almost a haphazard affair there was a time in the not too distant past where it was not uncommon for a professional audio person to be strongly criticized and often ostracised for providing or distributing mastered material that didn't meter within 3dB of 0VU, or material that had peaks greater than 10dB above 0VU. A good audio person should be able to get those two figures within range on any master they send out, sadly that no longer seems to be the case with the excuse of "artful discretion" being the most often cited reason for departure from the media norm...

I and many others completely understand the "artful discretion" thing, but unfortunately the mincer that is the commercial media, that is YouTube, that is Spotify, all of them don't give a damn. Many many years of 'broadcasting to the world' by these media and all those systems have been built and setup with 'Standard' audio levels in mind. A Standard that was set before most of us were born and prefers average audio levels up to but below 0VU, and with peaks no more than 10dB above that..

For everyone's info... 0VU is the point where typically the colour of the audio meter changes, usually this change is from Green to Red. When you watch the meter in action you'll see a solid lit section and often a dot that seems to hang in there for a second. The solid lit section is the average audio level at that time, and the dot is the peak level contained within the averaged audio. Consider a guitar playing a sustained note while a snare drum it struck, the guitar note will essentially set the average level while the snare will be the peak within that average.

"Yeah, on my system those meter thingies just light up. I don't care cos it still sounds good"... Well, I can't argue the point as if it sounds good then all must be good, but not quite. You may have success uploading your track to Spotify or YouTube, but on the off chance you send a copy of your beloved track to Sony Music or Paramount pictures and they want to use it there is a high chance that they will tell you to go back to the studio and re-record it due to 'technical issues' on your original digital release. They could fix it but most likely they won't, and despite you giving permission they won't take a copy off YouTube or Spotify. Nope, you'll have to go through the whole recording process again with the meters reading correctly if your amazing track is ever to be the soundtrack to that latest release block buster movie...

"The world is against me, they're stifling my creativity"... Nope again !... It's just the way the hardware works at the big end of town. The end of town where the BIG money is... If you can make your creativity fit within the confines of all these mediums then there will never be a reason for them to tell you to do your homework again, and it will be first time every time forever for you ...