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Stephen Pickering

Tag: Spotify

  • Why You Must Dither When You Bounce

    Even if you’re keeping the same bit depth.

    The short of it is, that the bounce down, say from 96khz/24bit to 44.1/24bit is going to raise your True Peak and integrated LUFS by .2-3 points. When you apply dithering, it tames that gain to only .1 point. There are technical reasons for this, but the short of it is, my last track I recorded in 96khz/24 bit in logic and for what ever reason when I googled about Dithering, the impression I got was that it was only necessary if you were reducing the bit depth, say from 24 to 16, which has been the common practice for years.

    But lately Spotify, Apple Music, and I assume the others are streaming in 24-bit, so I didn’t feel the need to dither. But then I noticed that jump after bouncing. Dithering solved the problem, or at least most of it. There still was a .1 jump both in True Peak and iLUFS, but not the .2-.3 point jump that you get otherwise. There are three Dithering options in Logic Pro X bouncing: Regular, and two different “Noise Shaping” ones. I tried all three, but at least for my song, they sounded the same and gave me the exact same readings on all the parameters of my Youlean Meter. So I just went with regular, the first choice.

    Here’s a comment I just wrote on a Youtube video by the brilliant “In the Mix” channel that I will link to at the end:

    Looking at those guidelines, does it mean if you keep your TP below 2.0 Spotify will let you get away with a little louder LUFS? The most recent song I uploaded had a TP of -2.1 and an integrated LUFS of -13.4. Since I kept it below -2 TP do you think they’ll let the .6db “slide” so to speak (as we say here in the States,hehhe) or will they reduce it still? The guidelines are a little obscure. They say if you are going to master louder than -14LUFS then make sure your TP is below -2. So I wasn’t quite sure how to interpret that. For sure with indies like myself, the holy grail as it were is to have a sonic quality and loudness that competes with the majors. Oh another think I’ve learned: You’ve got to employ dithering, even if you keep the same bit depth on the bounce or mixdown. I accepted the Youlean measurements within the mix because they were the very last on the stereo buss chain. But the mix down from 96/24 to 44.1/24 even keeping wave lossless bumped up the TP and iLUFS by .2-.3 points. Employing dithering tamed those losses to only .1 And the readouts were exactly the same whether using regular dithering or the two “Noise Shaping” varieties. Cheers!

    Stephen Pickering


  • How to Fix a Spotify Embed That’s Too Tall or Stretches Too Far Down the Page

    I just released a new single last week, and when I created a new post about it, which included a Spotify embed of the single, even though the embed only contained two songs it stretched all the way down the page. When I google searched for a solution, I came to this page: Spotify embeds have large blank space at bottom on WordPress.org, but their solution, a bit of CSS code added to your Appearance >> Themes >> Customize >> Additional CSS didn’t work for me. As of this writing I’m using the TwentyTwenty WordPress theme.

    At first I thought I found the answer simply by adding px after the height number the Spotify gives you for the code. In their code it’s just the number 180 in parentheses. I added a px at the end of that number, and that seemed to solve it, at least as an individual post, but on the main page of the blog at the domain level (as of this writing it is my most recent post), the problem still persisted.

    Somewhere along the line of my search, I found someone had wrapped the <iframe> tag that Spotify gives you in a <figure> tag which I had never heard of, but that didn’t help either. What finally worked (at least it seems so at this moment, is keeping that px addition (to the height not the width) and then wrapping the whole thing in a div tag. Here’s what the final code looks like:

    <div><figure><iframe src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/album/5r5zBUsuM7tsJtDC3x0AE9" width="300" height="180px" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" allow="encrypted-media"></iframe></figure></div>

    You can see I went ahead and left the figure tag in there. I don’t know if that makes any difference or not. But the above code seems to have solved my problem as of this writing at least in WordPress and the particular TwentyTwenty theme I’m using at the moment. Just replace your own Spotify code within this nest and add px at the end of the height value and see if it works for you.