True Peak vs Peak — What Every Musician Needs to Know About Headroom
You've set your limiter to 0 dBFS and think you're safe. You're not. Here's what's actually happening to your audio — and why –1.0 dBTP is the number that matters.
If you've ever handed a master to a streaming platform and noticed it sounding slightly distorted or harsh compared to what you heard in your DAW, there's a good chance you ran into the difference between peak and true peak. It's one of the most misunderstood concepts in music production, and getting it wrong is surprisingly easy.
The short version: a standard peak meter in your DAW doesn't tell you the full story. Streaming platforms encode your audio into compressed formats like AAC or MP3 — and that encoding process can add up to 1 dB of additional peak level to your file. If you're already sitting at 0 dBFS, that extra headroom doesn't exist, and your audio clips during encoding.
Peak (dBFS) measures the highest sample in your digital audio. True peak (dBTP) measures what happens between the samples — the actual analog waveform that gets reconstructed during playback and encoding. True peak is always equal to or higher than peak.
See the difference — interactive meter
Toggle between a safe master and an over-limited one to see how the meters respond — and what happens when encoding headroom runs out.
What encoding actually does to your audio
When Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube receives your WAV file, they encode it into a compressed format for streaming. AAC and MP3 encoding uses mathematical approximations of your audio — and those approximations can create intersample peaks that exceed what was in the original file.
Peak vs True Peak — the key differences
What to actually do about it
Managing true peak is part of what mastering does — ensuring your master has the right loudness, the right ceiling, and the right headroom for every platform it's going to. If you're sending a mix for mastering, you don't need to worry about true peak in your mix. Just leave the master bus clean (no heavy limiting) and let the mastering engineer handle the final delivery specs.
Want someone to handle all of this for you?
True peak, LUFS targets, intersample peaks — this is what mastering does. Send me your mix and I'll deliver a streaming-ready master with every spec dialled in correctly, for every platform.
