Why is my YouTube video so quiet?

You export your video, upload it, hit play — and it's whisper-quiet next to everything else. You crank your speakers, your viewers crank theirs, and the comments say “great video, couldn't hear a word.” Here's what's actually going on.

Your peaks are lying to you

Most editing software shows you peak levels — the single loudest instant in your audio. Your video can have totally healthy-looking peaks and still be far too quiet overall, because what you hear as loudness is the average over time, not the loudest spike. A single loud clap can make your meters look fine while the dialogue sits 10 dB too low.

YouTube only turns things down

Here's the part that surprises everyone: YouTube normalizes loud videos down to its target, but it does not reliably turn quiet videos up. So if your video is quiet, it stays quiet — while everyone else's properly-normalized video plays at full volume right next to it in the feed.

The one-number fix: −14 LUFS

LUFS is just a way of measuring that perceived average loudness. Around −14 LUFS is the target YouTube (and TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Spotify) normalizes to. Hit −14 and your video plays at the same volume as everything else, with peaks kept under −1 dBTP so nothing clips.

How to actually fix it

You could learn compression, limiting and gain staging — or you could measure your file and apply exactly the right amount of gain in one click. That's literally what TubeTune's loudness fixer does: it measures the full track, computes the precise correction, and hands you back a file at −14 LUFS. It takes about a minute, it's free, and your file never leaves your device.