Guides

Making an EP sound like one record: consistent loudness across tracks

Updated 2026-09-06

Master five songs on five different days and you get five good masters and a bad album. The listener notices the jump between tracks long before they notice the tone of any one of them.

What consistent means

• Integrated loudness within about 1 LU across the release, so nobody reaches for the volume knob between songs.
• A shared tonal balance. The same low-mid cut, the same air, the same width target, applied to every track from one profile.
• One true peak ceiling, held on every track.

The quiet song problem

Every EP has one ballad. Pushed to the same loudness as the single, it loses its dynamics and sounds crushed. Left at its natural level, it sounds small in the sequence. The answer is a range, not a number: let it sit 1 to 2 LU under the loudest track, and keep its crest factor. Streaming normalization is per track by default on most services, so the gap is smaller than it feels in your player.

How album mastering works in Burnish

Upload the tracks together, pick one genre profile, and the engine masters them as a set: shared tone, one loudness target, and a report that lists every track's loudness, true peak and crest side by side so you can see the spread. Tracks that need it get the same repair stage as a single. Web credits apply per track. On iOS, album mastering is arriving as an add-on.