Gents
I read an interwiew of B. Katz about I Tunes radio  normalizing there program.
For him there is a big chance that the loudness ends mid 2014 while he´s awaiting all radio station doing that.
 
http://www.completemusicu...m/article/qa-bob-katz/
I have 2 questions about:
 
1)  What means " normalizing."
 
 
Do you also think so ?
 
Pragi

1) In a nutshell the article gave a pretty good definition "This brings the volume of quiet songs up and pushes louder songs down."
2) absolutely

sounds like shameless sycophancy to Apple

I think Katz is broadly right about this, though he's missing a huge part of the picture, which is all the music listening done on the likes of Soundcloud and Bandcamp and so on. Itunes and Spotify aren't anywhere near the whole pie. So I think it might take a bit longer than he hopes for this to become standard. But I think it will happen.

In this case normalization isn't making something as loud as possible.  Instead it's akin to when human mixers used to adjust the gain of different programs in broadcast to produce reasonable levels.
 
There's now a standard whereby a process can run through the audio and determine the correct gain based on several factors, peak rise/fall/crest factor/etc.  It is not an auto-gain scenario where dynamics are lost.  Instead it's a single gain factor applied to the whole program material.  I'm looking forward to no longer getting blasted by commercials.
 
Keith

I guess I will believe it when it actually happens. Market tends to be driven more by demand than expert opinion. Sales of headphones designed more for loudness than quality thrive. Beats audio being worth 3.2 billion is a testament to that. The average pop consumer seems to prefer loud and care less about dynamics. I read an article about how Kanye West ( yes, he's a loudmouth narcissist but a very successfull loudmouth narcissist) has pulled his own songs off the market and re-released after hearing them in club and determing original master was not loud enough compared to peers songs heard within same set.

If I recall correctly, there were some rules in place for governing how loud a commercial could sound, as compared against the TV show is was being run in, where it had to either be at or less than the volume, BUT it left a gaping hole where they could pick the loudest single instant of volume from the show and use that as the sound against the commercial's volume had to be measured against.
 
So, if a show had a bunch of blah blah blah dialog for 59 minutes, but there was a single cutaway shot to some random bomb going off, the commercial could blast as loud as that bomb blast and still conform.
 
So soooooooooooooooooooooo please let this come to pass as quickly as possible.
 
I like heading off to sleep with the TV on, and I often get jarred awake by some crazy loud commercial for 'roll on' headache medicine, or some other crap.
 
Bob Bone
 

Keith touches on something I think reflects the main consumer concern. IMHO the majority of radio listeners could care less about dynamic range in music. It's the loud commercials that drive them nuts. This generation has been spoonfed a steady diet of squashed mp3 based loud pop long enough that songs not mixed in that way are often percieved as weak in comparison. That is sad but certainy is my experience when dealing with kids at studio

It's partly due to the Calm Act, R128 EBU standards.
I've been mixing @-23LUFS for several years now & glad to see it's becoming accepted more & more in today's music industry.
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cs0Vq9XrT2U
 
 

Thanks for your explanations and opinions, really helpful .
I´m asking myself how my new ( first time self -mastered)
songs sound after "normalization..................."
Anybody here know´s how to normalize (in X3?)?
I remember a normalize function in the good old Logic 5,
which I never used.