Recently, Newgrounds have rolled out an update to normalize the loudness of music in the audio portal, bringing similar loudness level for all users' upload. I am really happy about this update since this have solves me a couples of problems as a user and a composer.

I have been enjoying some new uploads on the audio portals, especially seeing how experienced users pushing their limit to create something cool and memorable, to beginners having their passion to learn and improve their music production skills. However, my home have an internet issue where loading music in Newgrounds takes ages, so I have to listen them in my workspace which is a scary experience where my workspace has a poor acoustic isolation, and I have a risk of distracting others if there are two tracks with extreme loudness difference. The loudness normalization really helps me a lot to listen and review more tracks on the portal.

As a composer, I prefer quieter mix since I like to let my instruments having some room to breathe rather than clamping all of them under a tiny box which I found my ears got really tired on very loud mix, but because most of the tracks in average are pretty loud here, I have to sacrifice quite a bit of headroom to match up the similar loudness to the adjacent uploads. Because the normalization kicks in, I no longer need to do that which you could already have seen that in my recent Space Bridge release using -12LUFS instead -9 or -8 LUFS in some of my older tracks.

In the future, I will remaster most of my upload as the following:

• for quieter tracks, for example belong; be wanted or spaghetti express train, will have the loudness of -12LUFS
• for the aggressive one, like evacuate now or computronus, will have the loudness of -10LUFS