Lingua Funqa - Just One Minute (final and mix versions)

[Digitaldruglord]

Here is the Apple Music -1db level compliant 24/44.1 master WAV file:

I recommend you check the quality of your brickwall. Not all brickwalls are good at avoiding intersample peaks and I suspect yours might be one of them; the TP value according to my unchecked plug(I've not calibrated this free one, it's not my DAW) was -0.4dBFS.

Being pedantic for the sake of political correctness, it's not Apple that sets the standards per se, but AES, and it's AES's recommendations for streaming that Apple follows. On this basis, your mix wouldn't be dynamic enough, as it falls well short of the -16LUFS Integrated Loudness target. At -8.3LUFS, it effectively means you've sacrificed 8dB of dynamics simply to make it louder which I can do my side by turning the amp up. It would sound lifeless if adjusted, compared to other songs that were dynamic.

Your record is hot and this excessive compression is adding some harshness and fatigue to the delivery. Granted, the stock was inherently problematic, but that's another reason not to go cranking the parameters. Using old school methodology, the RMS is 6.4. Now that's hot.

Listening to this, it might suggest you have a need for loudness and it's artifacts, more than dynamics. You might want to explore this further. If you are intentionally making hot mixes in order to compete with the anti-educational loudness war that's evident in this forum (the severely clipping and cranked up preview mix doesn't help), then I'll butt out and let you get on with it It would be sad if this were the case, but reading your posts suggests you'd like to be quality orientated.

One suggestion would be to calibrate your monitors and turn them up when needed, rather than turning the mix up by increasing RMS. If you are on small monitors (less than 8 inches), it becomes more difficult to assess dynamics with decreasing woofer size. But then, we have meters to help our brain make decisions on the occasions that our ears may be fooling us.

I thought it was really great idea to post both the mix and the master as you did, especially if you intend cranking the master up. You gave us a chance to hear your mix processing at first hand rather than guess what you did by hearing a master that bears little relevance to the mix itself like many here. I would say that your mix was hot as a mix and taking this genre into account, and would pass as a master without further processing, on the AES scale, that is.

No one should ever spend that much time on 1 mix/song.. in the real world, a client would have to try different mixers and decide which their happy with. The way things go is everyone today ends up on digital services and even though there’s a -1db acceptance standard that deleted the loudness wars, the sound still has to “compete” with everything else.

While technicalities are important, feel of a mix/song is more important. 1 out of 100 people may be keen on audio technicalities.. so the focus is you can mix for the 1 or the other 99.