glossary
Short-term loudness is slow enough to ignore tiny spikes and fast enough to show section-level energy changes.
Short-term loudness is a LUFS reading over a moving window of a few seconds. It sits between fast momentary loudness and full-song integrated loudness.
That makes it useful for checking verses, choruses, drops, and vocal sections without waiting for the whole track average to settle.
A chorus should often feel lifted compared with a verse, but the lift may come from arrangement, brightness, width, or density rather than raw gain.
Short-term LUFS helps confirm whether a section is actually louder or just arranged to feel more energetic.
Bus compression, saturation, and limiting can raise short-term loudness while reducing punch. Level-match those moves before deciding they improved the mix.
Meter Core keeps short-window loudness beside peak and stereo checks so section energy stays connected to delivery safety.