You've finished the mix, you've got a master, and you're about to hit upload. Wait — is it actually ready? A surprising number of releases go out with inter-sample clipping, the wrong loudness, or two seconds of dead air at the start. None of it is hard to catch; it just needs a checklist. Here's everything worth verifying before your track hits streaming, in one pass.
A release-ready master clears a handful of technical checks: its loudness is in the right ballpark for streaming, its true peak won't clip once encoded, there's no digital clipping, it folds down to mono cleanly, it's a lossless file at a proper sample rate, and the silence at the start and end is tight. Each one is easy to miss on its own — together they're the difference between a track that sounds pro everywhere and one that gets turned down, distorted, or starts with an awkward gap.
Streaming platforms normalise to around −14 LUFS. Land far off and they'll turn your track up or down to match — which can change how it sits next to others.
If your true peak sits between −1 and 0 dBTP, you risk inter-sample clipping once the track is encoded to MP3 or AAC. Aiming for −1 dBTP keeps it clean.
Hard digital clipping adds distortion you can't undo. A clean signal with zero clipped samples is the baseline for a master.
Plenty of playback is mono — phone speakers, club subs, some Bluetooth gear. A master that folds to mono without phase cancellation holds up everywhere.
Distributors want a lossless file at a distribution-grade sample rate. A WAV at 44.1 or 48 kHz is the safe, standard delivery.
A long gap before the music makes a track feel like it starts late; an abrupt cut at the end feels unfinished. Tight, natural silence at both ends looks professional.
At minimum: integrated loudness (around −14 LUFS for streaming), true peak (aim for −1 dBTP to avoid inter-sample clipping), no clipping, mono compatibility, sample rate and format, and the leading and trailing silence. A pre-release checker runs all of these in one pass so nothing slips through.
True peak measures the real peak level after digital-to-analog reconstruction, which can be higher than the sample peaks. If it sits between −1 and 0 dBTP, your track risks inter-sample clipping once it's encoded to MP3 or AAC for streaming. Aiming for −1 dBTP keeps it clean.
No. LUFS measures perceived loudness over time; true peak measures the highest instantaneous level. They're related but separate. The Release Checker reports both as part of a broader checklist — for a deep dive on loudness targets per platform, use the dedicated LUFS guide.