Taka
Founder of Soneam. Software developer by trade, and a mastering engineer on the side, which is the order that matters: I write software full time, and the audio work is what taught me which parts of a client handoff are broken.
I build Soneam, which is a review and delivery platform for people who send finished audio to clients. It came out of the part of the job I kept getting wrong: the master was done, and then it went out as an MP3 in a chat window and came back as three messages in two places. The approval was a thumbs up that nobody could produce again a month later.
Why the numbers on this site are measured rather than repeated
Most of what circulates about streaming loudness is second-hand, and a lot of it is out of date or was never right. So the guides here measure instead: masters through the actual encoders, true peak read with a standard implementation rather than something I wrote, and the script printed in full so anyone can run it on their own work and disagree with me from the same starting point.
When something cannot be measured, the pages say so. Spotify does not publish which container its apps use, and the pages that touch it say that in the same breath as the number.
What I do not claim
I am not a full-time mastering engineer and this site does not pretend otherwise. The people whose work I learn from do this every day and have for decades. What I have is a narrower thing: I master enough records to have felt the handoff go wrong, and I can build the tool and run the measurement, which turns out to be an unusual combination in this corner of the industry.
Contact
Corrections are welcome, and if a measurement here is wrong I would rather hear it than not. support@soneam.com reaches me directly.