Ever heard of the Loudness War? It’s the steady ramp-up in perceived volume that has plagued popular music for the past 30+ years. Producers have steadily chipped away at dynamic range in an effort to make a hotter track. Audio signal-to-noise ratio suffers. Nowadays the typical radio song has a 3-6 dB dynamic range (for comparison, CDs have a theoretical 96 dB range).

Well folks: I’m playing to WIN. Here is a compressor that scales ALL of your peaks to 100%: in other words, compression at a ratio of INFINITY : 1… or a dynamic range of 0. TAKE THAT, PRODUCERS.

Here’s an example in action, cutting from Clair de Lune. First, the original. Then, the RADIO-READY version.

Doesn’t this just sound so much more… hip / edgy / loud / etc?

Interestingly, I tried it on a selection of pop music. It makes for a great demonstration of “listener fatigue”.

0dbfs.zip – zip file containing Perl script, 1.7 kB