Opened the file in Audacity and ran the ReplayGain calculations and added +3 dB to estimate what Spotify would do.ģ. I took a master file and loaded it in RX (from iZotope) and ran the Waveform Statistics and got the sample peak and integrated LUFS number.Ģ. My method and results are below, followed by Ian’s method and results.ġ. Naturally, we wanted to test this to make sure it was sound advice. Take the number it gives you and add +3 dB to it and then you should have the amount of gain change that Spotify will apply! When the plugin is open you get the chance to 'Normalize or Analyze' and you choose 'Analyze' and press OK.ħ. Open the file of the song you want to measure in Audacity and select the Replay Gain plugin.Ħ. (If you don’t see it right away, select “Add / Remove Plug-ins…” in the Effect menu, find and select ReplayGain, end click Enable).ĥ.

Open Audacity and then you should find the Replay Gain plugin in the Effect tab/list. Open the Application folder, right click on Audacity and select 'Show Package Contents' open the Contents folder and then the 'plug-ins' folder and place the ReplayGain.ny plugin there.Ĥ. Go to and download the ReplayGain.ny plugin.ģ. Go and download Audacity and install it.Ģ. they were apparently adding +6 dB before! So we had to take that into consideration in our tests.ġ. and off we went to test it.ĭespite the recent ' Spotify lowers its loudness target by -3 dB discussions', they are still adding +3 dB into Replay Gain. I had heard that Audacity did it but I didn't find the option to do so, but Ian Stewart found the plugin that does it. I knew Foobar does it, but I'm on Mac so that was too much of a workaround to make that work. So we only needed to find a tool that measures Replay Gain.

But we know for a fact that Spotify uses Replay Gain. I say that with confidence even though I've written about it myself and helped Ian Shepherd to crunch some numbers for i.e. As of this writing, that is actually very incorrect. The 'word on the street' (meaning online, forums and Facebook groups) is that 'all streaming services uses LUFS values to normalize to'. I was talking to my friend Ian Stewart ( ) recently and we discovered that we had both been playing around with the same idea which was to find a solution to calculate Replay Gain measurements to predict how much (and how) Spotify would adjust the loudness levels of a song.

What is spotify audio normalization