The Loudness War - Dynamic Range Database

[AlexZangari]

For those of you unfamiliar, the "Loudness War" is (in layman's terms) the modern ideology of "louder is better" in the context of music production. Basically, recorded music has been pushed to be louder and louder to a negative effect. Digital music has its limits - there is a volume ceiling that you will hit. However, once producers hit this ceiling they didn't stop. Even though they couldn't get the loudest parts of the recording any higher, they continued amping up the parts with the lowest volume - thus creating a smaller dynamic range (a.k.a. the difference between the loudest and softest parts of a recording). Thus we have music whose loud parts aren't that much louder than its soft parts, and are therefore less effective.

Here is a database where you can search for albums to see what their dynamic range is.
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kill yr idols

[Guest]

So few artists seem have a mastery of the art of dynamics. It seems like most artists don't even really think about dynamic contrasts. Not that you necessarily need to make it a huge focus to make good music, but I usually find myself appreciating artists that do this a lot more than those that don't.

[Defago]

That's why I like to compress my stuff just as little as possible. There's nothing wrong with having some super loud parts and some super quiet parts, some people seem to think huge doses of compression are necessary on every single piece of music, but in the end just makes the loud parts indistinguishable from the quiet parts.

[GeevyDallas]

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