← All posts

SoundCloud Volume Too Low? Fix a Quiet DJ Mix

By Scott Young

The Problem

You spent hours perfecting your mix. The transitions are smooth, the energy builds, the drops hit hard. You export it, upload to SoundCloud, and press play.

It sounds quiet.

Not just a little quieter than the tracks you're mixing between. Significantly quieter. The kind of quiet that makes listeners reach for the volume knob, or worse, skip to the next track.

Why This Happens

Three things are working against you:

1. Streaming Normalization

SoundCloud, Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube all normalize loudness on playback - SoundCloud's help centre says so directly. Tracks that are too loud get turned down to match everything else (around -14 LUFS on most platforms), so pushing your mix hotter doesn't make it play louder.

Here's the catch: platforms are cautious about turning quiet tracks up, and SoundCloud doesn't say whether it does at all. If your mix sits well below the target, it can still play back quieter than the tracks around it.

2. Mixes Are Harder to Make Loud

A single track has one consistent dynamic range. A DJ mix has many - the quiet breakdown of one track sits next to the peak of another. If you just push the limiter, you crush the quiet parts and distortion creeps into the loud ones.

Professional mastering engineers spend most of their time on exactly this problem: making the whole mix feel loud and consistent without destroying the dynamics that make it work.

3. Your DAW's Master Fader Isn't Mastering

Turning up the output gain in your DAW doesn't make the mix louder on SoundCloud. It just makes it clip - and a hot, clipped file picks up extra distortion when SoundCloud converts it to its streaming formats. Mastering is a separate process with its own tools - EQ, compression, limiting, and loudness targeting.

What Actually Fixes It

You need to master the mix as a single file, treating it like one continuous track. That means:

  • EQ to balance the frequency spectrum across transitions - one track might be bass-heavy, the next treble-forward
  • Compression to even out the dynamics between sections
  • Loudness targeting to hit -14 LUFS, the level SoundCloud itself recommends
  • True peak limiting to catch inter-sample peaks that cause distortion on playback

You can do this manually in your DAW with a chain of plugins. Or you can use a tool that does it automatically - like Acetate, which masters DJ mixes with genre-aware processing and shows you every decision it makes before you export.

The Quick Fix

Before your next upload:

  1. Export your mix as a single WAV or FLAC (not MP3 - you want the full quality for mastering)
  2. Master it - either manually or with a tool like Acetate
  3. Check the loudness: aim for -14 LUFS integrated, with true peak below -1 dBTP
  4. Upload the mastered version

Not sure which target to use? See the LUFS targets for Bandcamp, SoundCloud and Spotify. SoundCloud's own mastering service doesn't cover DJ mixes, so see what it does and doesn't support.

Your listeners will notice the difference immediately.

Try Acetate free - one master, no signup

Not ready to master? Check your mix loudness free in the browser - see your LUFS, true peak, and tonal balance before you commit.

Once the loudness is right, master the whole mix with Acetate - it reads every transition and shows each move in the chain.