Podcast Loudness Check — Is Your Episode Getting Turned Down by Spotify?

Podcast mixing isn't music mixing. No drop, no 808 — just a voice that needs to be clear and loud enough for a commute. Most podcasters either master too quiet or slam through a limiter to -8 LUFS, pumping every breath. MixDiagnose measures against the loudness targets every platform enforces and tells you whether your voice is getting normalized down, crushed, or sitting right.

Frequencies That Make or Break a Podcast

80–200 Hz: Voice warmth. Too much sounds boomy, too little thin. We flag where your low-end sits. 300–800 Hz: The "boxy" zone where cheap USB mics pile up; a 4–6 dB dip around 400 Hz separates home-recorded from studio. 2–4 kHz: Where consonants live — the sounds that make speech understandable on phones. We flag when presence drops below the intelligibility threshold. 5–10 kHz: Sibilance territory. Sharp S and T sounds spike here; over-de-essing sounds lispy, under-de-essing pierces. We detect the peaks so you can calibrate.

Mistakes That Make Podcasts Sound Amateur

Ignoring LUFS targets: Spotify normalizes to -14, Apple to -16, YouTube to -14. Deliver at -8 and every platform turns you down. We give the exact normalization delta.

Over-compressing: A 15:1 ratio squashes breaths to word level — fatigue in five minutes. We measure crest factor and flag when compression kills the performance. Room tone left in: AC hum at 60 Hz, fluorescent buzz at 120 Hz — you stopped hearing it, listeners didn't. We detect noise below 100 Hz separately from voice. Inconsistent host levels: One at -16, the other at -22. We flag swings exceeding 3 LU.

What MixDiagnose Checks for Podcasts

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