Loudness for Youtube

YouTube will adjust the playback level of your audio. YouTube calls this “Loudness Equalization”. You can see this by right clicking on the YouTube video playback window, and click “Stats for Nerds”. This is what the “Volume/Normalized” heading is. YouTube analyses the audio present in your video and makes a determination if the volume at certain places – or overall – in your video needs to be adjusted for a pleasurable volume level of playback for the viewer.

Unfortunately, there is nothing you can do to prevent this. However, what you can do is minimize the audio tweaking YouTube does so as much of your artistic decision on loudness is retained.

You can start by metering and mixing your audio using the Loudness Units relative to Full Scale, otherwise known as LUFS, inside your NLE or DAW (you may need a 3rd party plugin to monitor audio in LUFS.) YouTube doesn’t release exact values, but YouTube tends to shoot for -12 to -14 LUFS, so try and keep your audio mixed within that range to reduce the amount of tinkering that YouTube does.

That being said, aiming for a specific integrated loudness doesn’t work, reliably. Experiment and see what sounds good to your ears.