Compare your master to the records you admire
Drop your track and up to five reference records: the tool averages the references and shows where you sit against that average — loudness, true peak, dynamics, mono, energy balance. Not against a standard: against the music you are aiming at.
1
Your track
The master you want to place. It never leaves your machine.
Your track
The master you want to place. It never leaves your machine.
Drop your track here
or
WAV, MP3, M4A, FLAC — nothing is sent anywhere.
2
The records you are aiming at
Up to five. They should sound like each other — that is what turns a taste into a style.
The records you are aiming at
Up to five. They should sound like each other — that is what turns a taste into a style.
Drop your reference tracks here
or
Files you own, at the best quality you have — a streaming rip has already been re-encoded and normalized.
Your references hold together: their loudness spans 0.8 LU and their spectral profiles are close. The average describes something real.
You are 1.9 dB louder than your references. Platforms will turn you down further than they turn them down.
You are where they are.
Why a reference beats a standard
Every loudness meter on the web compares you to the same numbers: −14 LUFS, −1 dBTP. Those numbers describe what a streaming platform does to your file. They do not describe the music you are trying to sit next to.
In urban music, nobody meets those targets — and nobody misses them at random either. A penalty of two to four decibels is the norm of the style, not an accident. Told "you do not comply", an artist learns nothing. Told "you are 1.9 dB louder than the five records you picked", they know exactly what they are deciding.
Our studio's own observation, not a published measurement — which is precisely why this tool measures your references instead of quoting ours.
The average is only worth what your references are worth
This is the part most comparison tools skip. Average a trap record, a folk song and a live jazz take and you get a number that describes none of them — and a comparison that sounds authoritative while meaning nothing.
So before showing you anything, Alumire measures how far apart your references are: the spread of their loudness, and how much their spectral balance varies from one to the next. If they disagree, that is the first thing you read.
The thresholds are orders of magnitude, and they are stated as such: about 2 LU of spread, or about 4 points of variation between bands, is where five records stop being one style.
Frequently asked
Are my files uploaded?
No — not yours, not your references. Every file is decoded by your browser and analyzed on your own machine. Six files in, nothing out. Cut your connection after the page has loaded and the tool still works.
Why compare to references instead of to a standard?
Because the standard answers a question nobody asks. What an artist wants is not to comply — it is to sit where the records they admire sit. In urban music nobody meets the broadcast targets, and nobody misses them at random either: they aim at another norm, the one of their style. This tool measures that norm instead of assuming it.
Why up to five, and not one?
One reference is a taste — one mastering engineer's choices on one day. Five that sound alike are a style. The tool averages them, and the average is only worth something if they agree.
What if my references do not sound alike?
Then the average describes nothing, and the tool says so before showing you anything else. It measures how far apart your references are — the spread of their loudness, and how much their spectral balance varies from one to the next. If they disagree, you get a warning at the top of the result, not a footnote at the bottom. Pick tracks that sound close to each other and the comparison starts to mean something.
Where should I get the reference files?
From files you own, at the best quality you have. ⚠️ Avoid audio ripped from a streaming service or from a video platform: it has been re-encoded and normalized, so its loudness and its true peak are the platform's, not the master's. A CD rip or a purchased download tells the truth.
Does it tell me what to change?
It tells you how far you are and on which side — never that you are wrong. A gap is a choice until you decide otherwise. The one place it stays strict is mono compatibility, because what cancels really does disappear, in every genre.