Home › What is LRA?
LRA — loudness range — measures how far a track's loudness travels between its quiet and loud sections, in loudness units (LU). It is the difference between music that breathes and music that holds one level for three minutes. Neither is wrong; LRA just tells you which one you made.
LRA (EBU Tech 3342) tracks short-term loudness across the whole file, throws away the extremes — the top 5% and the quietest 10% — and reports the spread of what remains. A track whose verses sit 6 LU under its choruses will show a healthy LRA; a track that is wall-to-wall drop will show almost none.
Rough bearings from measured material: much current playlist pop and electronic music lives between 1 and 5 LU; dynamic rock, jazz and singer-songwriter productions between 5 and 9; film scores and classical recordings can exceed 15.
Three different "dynamics" numbers get conflated. Crest factor is the gap between peaks and average level — transient life, on the milliseconds scale. PLR (peak-to-loudness ratio) is its loudness-referenced sibling. LRA works on the scale of song sections: verses versus choruses, breakdowns versus drops. A techno track can be heavily limited (low crest) yet still show LRA if it has a real breakdown — and a gentle folk song can have huge crest but tiny LRA if it never changes intensity.
Club tracks, lo-fi beats and ambient beds are often designed to hold level — DJs and playlist listeners expect it. The measured playlist profiles on this site make that visible: sleep and ambient lineups sit at LRA values under 2 LU, while rock lineups run several times that. The useful move is matching your track's behavior to the room it's aiming for, not maximizing a number. You can browse those measured lineups at /playlists.
The report includes LRA, true peak and integrated LUFS, measured the way platforms measure them.
Measure my track's dynamics — freeThere is no required value. Loudness normalization aligns average levels between tracks, but the movement inside your track — the LRA — is untouched and remains an artistic decision.
Usually bus compression and limiting applied to the whole song, or an arrangement that never drops intensity. If sections that felt different in the mix measure the same, the master flattened them.
No. DR-style measurements compare peaks to average level (like crest factor); LRA compares loud sections to quiet sections. A track can score low on one and high on the other.
For some editorial contexts, yes — a 12 LU track inside a steady focus playlist will feel out of place at both its extremes. That's measurable: check where your track actually fits.
The loudness unit behind every platform's normalization.
Inter-sample peaks, dBTP, and the -1 dBTP ceiling.
Your sound, ranked against real editorial lineups.