Troubleshooting
My episode sounds quieter than other podcasts — how do I fix it?
Export with a platform preset instead of leaving the level as mixed. Cast measures the whole episode and matches it to the loudness your platform expects, which is what makes one show sit at the same volume as the next.
Perceived loudness is not peak volume. Two episodes can both peak at the same place and still sound a world apart, because the ear responds to the average energy over time. That average is measured in LUFS, and every platform normalises to a target — so a quiet file gets turned up, a loud one gets turned down, and only the one that arrives near the target keeps the dynamics you intended.
Picking the preset for where you publish is the whole fix: podcast apps sit around −16 LUFS, YouTube around −14, broadcast around −23. Cast measures your finished mix and matches it in one pass at export.
If it still feels quiet after that, the cause is usually underneath: a recording with a very wide gap between the loud and quiet parts has to be turned down to fit its peaks, so the average lands low. Enhancing the voice, or gentle compression on the clip, closes that gap before the loudness stage ever sees it.
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