LUFS (Loudness Units relative to Full Scale) is the loudness unit defined by the International Telecommunication Union in Recommendation ITU-R BS.1770. The key difference from traditional dB peak metering: peak level only captures the waveform’s instantaneous maximum, while LUFS applies a hearing-model frequency weighting (K-weighting) and averages loudness over the whole program — much closer to “how loud it actually sounds.”
BS.1770 also defines true peak (dBTP) measurement: oversampling reveals the real waveform peaks that occur between digital samples, preventing clipping that would otherwise appear only after format conversion.
BS.1770 measurement includes a gating mechanism: passages below a threshold (such as pauses in an interview) are excluded from the average. That is why an episode with plenty of silence still reports a loudness figure that correctly reflects the spoken parts.
Before you merge material from different sources — interview recordings, theme music, ads — align each segment to the same loudness target first, so the result doesn’t lurch between loud and quiet. On export, land the average loudness near your platform’s spec and leave -1 dBTP of true-peak headroom, and the platform won’t have to re-process your audio.
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