How to make a video louder (without distorting it)

The quickest way is the free video volume booster. It works in your browser, on your device: nothing is uploaded, there's no watermark and nothing to sign up for.

1. Open your video, or a sound file. It takes up to 60 minutes of video, or 3 hours of sound, at a time.
2. See how loud it is. It measures the whole thing in LUFS, the loudness measure streaming services use to even out volume, and finds its highest peak.
3. Pick a target: −14 LUFS for TikTok, Reels, Shorts and YouTube (none of them publishes a level; this is the one Spotify evens music out to), −16 LUFS for a podcast (what Apple Podcasts asks for), or turn it up by a set number of decibels, up to +20 dB.
4. Play it before and after. Listen to the loudest moment, a laugh or a shout: that's where distortion shows first.
5. Download it. The picture is copied as it is, not re-encoded, so it looks exactly as it did; only the sound is re-encoded. A sound file comes back as an MP3.

A limiter keeps the peaks under −1 dB, so it gets louder without distorting. It works the other way too: a video that's too loud is turned down to the target. Why a target in LUFS beats a volume slider, and why the limiter matters, comes next.

Digital sound has a ceiling: 0 dBFS (decibels relative to full scale), the loudest a file can hold. Every recording has peaks, like a laugh, a hard “p” or a door, that sit far above its average level. Turn the whole thing up and the peaks reach the ceiling first. Whatever would go past it is cut off flat. That's clipping: you hear it as crackle, buzz or a harsh edge on the loud moments.

So a plain volume slider runs out of room long before the voice is loud enough. If a quiet recording peaks at −6 dB, you can only turn it up 6 dB before it clips, even though most of it is still quiet. iMovie on a Mac shows this as color: Apple says that if you see red or yellow in the waveform, lower the volume until it's all green.

A limiter is the fix. It's an automatic volume control that only acts on the peaks: whenever the sound would cross a ceiling you set, it turns that instant down, then lets go. The voice and everything else come up by the full amount; only the loudest moments are held back. That's how the free tool makes a video louder without distortion.

• Keep the ceiling a little under 0. Spotify asks for true peaks below −1 dB because that's best for lossy formats like AAC, the sound in nearly every video file. Apple Podcasts asks for the same. The free tool's limiter holds the samples at −1 dB; a true peak, measured between the samples and after encoding, can land a little higher, so check it with a true-peak meter when a spec asks for one.
• Don't ask a limiter for too much. A few dB of limiting is hard to hear. Push a very quiet recording up 20 dB and the limiter is working all the time: the sound gets flat and tiring. Record a little louder next time.
• Clipping in the recording can't be undone. If the sound was already distorted when it was recorded, turning it up makes the distortion louder too. No volume tool can rebuild the cut-off peaks.

Volume sliders and peak meters work in decibels. Loudness targets are in LUFS. They're related, but they don't measure the same thing:

LUFS stands for Loudness Units relative to Full Scale. It's measured the way the ITU's ITU-R BS.1770-5 standard sets out: it weights the frequencies your ears are most sensitive to, and averages over the whole video, without letting long silences drag the number down. LKFS is the same scale under another name, the EBU notes. A loudness meter gives one number for the whole video, its integrated loudness, and that's what targets refer to.

Why it matters: two videos that peak at the same level can sound very different. A whisper with one loud clap peaks as high as a shouted rant. Peaks tell you when you'll clip; LUFS tells you how loud it will sound next to everything else in the feed.

Only some of the platforms publish a number. Here's what each says on its own pages, and where it says nothing:

For TikTok, Reels and Shorts, aim for about −14 LUFS. None of them publishes a target: YouTube's recommended upload settings cover the sound's codec and bitrate, not its loudness, and figures quoted for any of the three come from third-party sites, not the apps. −14 is the level Spotify plays music at, and it's what the free tool and Clyper's clips aim for. That's our choice, not a platform's rule.

For a podcast, −16 LUFS with peaks under −1: that's Apple's spec, and close to Spotify's level. More on mastering an episode in how to edit a podcast.

Why not leave it to the platform? Normalization only helps so much. Spotify turns quiet tracks up only as far as their peaks allow, leaving 1 dB of headroom: in its own example, a track at −20 LUFS with peaks at −5 dB is lifted only to −16, and only its Loud setting adds a limiter. YouTube's stable volume isn't on every video, and YouTube may adjust volume levels on uploads unless you uncheck “Let YouTube enhance audio quality” in YouTube Studio's advanced settings. A video that's already at a good level sounds right everywhere, whatever the player does.

On iPhone, use iMovie or CapCut. Apple's guide to editing video in Photos has no volume control: it covers trimming, speed and Audio Mix, which changes the balance between voices and background on videos recorded with Spatial Audio, not how loud the whole video is.

• iMovie on iPhone: open the video in a movie project, tap the clip in the timeline, tap the Audio button in the inspector at the bottom, and drag the volume slider. Apple's guide doesn't say how far above the original it goes.
• CapCut (iPhone and Android): tap the clip and use its Volume slider. CapCut's pages don't give a maximum for the phone app.

On Android, it depends on the phone. Samsung's Gallery editor has a volume slider: open the video's editor, tap the Audio icon (the speaker), and adjust the video volume. Google Photos can mute a video, and shows a Volume control for the video's own sound and a soundtrack once you've added music. Neither Samsung nor Google says whether its slider goes above the original level, so for a real boost use CapCut.

Inside the apps, Instagram's Reels editor lets you set each sound's volume: tap Audio, then drag the bars below each type of audio, such as your camera audio and a song. That sets the mix; it doesn't limit peaks, so a quiet recording is best boosted before you upload it.

A phone slider is a plain volume control: turn it up far and the peaks clip. If the loudest moment crackles, use the free volume booster, whose limiter holds the peaks back.

Every desktop editor can turn a clip up. Here's where each one does it, as its maker describes it:

Clipchamp is the simplest on Windows, up to 200%. Microsoft doesn't mention a limiter, so listen to the loud parts after. Its Audio tab also has noise suppression; for a video clip, detach the audio first, Microsoft says.

iMovie on a Mac warns you before you clip: red or yellow in the waveform means too loud. Its Noise Reduction and Equalizer button has a Reduce background noise checkbox, worth turning on before you turn a noisy clip up.

CapCut on a computer goes furthest with a plain slider, +20 dB. Its pages say its loudness normalization aims at −23 LUFS, the European broadcast level, which is quiet for social video, so measure what you get.

Premiere Pro has the most control. Audio Gain's Adjust Gain by turns the clip up by the dB you type. Normalize Max Peak to turns it up until its loudest peak reaches the level you set, say −1 dB, which is safe from clipping but can only go as far as the single highest peak allows: one loud cough and the rest barely moves. For loudness, use the Loudness Meter effect, which has presets for Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Netflix and YouTube, or Adobe Media Encoder's Loudness Normalization on export (in the Effects tab), where you pick a standard (ATSC A/85, EBU R128, or ITU BS.1770-3 with a target you set).

One difference from the free tool: an editor re-encodes the picture when you export. Clipchamp, for one, exports an MP4 at 30 frames a second. If the sound is the only thing you're changing, the free volume booster copies the picture as it is instead.

A video can sound too quiet for reasons volume won't solve. Check these before you turn it up:

• It's noisy. Turning up a recording turns up the fan, the hum and the traffic with the voice. Clean it first with the free remove background noise from video tool, then set the loudness. How to pick its strength is in how to remove background noise from a video.
• One voice is quieter than the other. A loudness target sets the whole video's level, not the balance inside it. If a guest sat far from the mic, even out the voices first: each track's volume, then a gentle compressor. The steps are in how to edit a podcast.
• The music is drowning the voice. Then the voice isn't too quiet; the music is too loud. The free add music to video tool sets the two volumes separately and can lower the music whenever someone talks.
• It was recorded distorted. Clipping in the recording stays. Use the cleanest take you have, or record the line again.

Loudness matters most on short clips. People swipe from video to video with the volume where they left it, so a clip much quieter than the one before sounds weak. A feed of your clips should play at one level.

Made by hand, that's one more step on every clip, after finding the moments, cutting them, framing them vertically and captioning them. Clyper does those steps: paste a YouTube link or upload a video (MP4, MOV, WebM or MKV, up to 4 GB), and it reads the transcript to find the moments that stand on their own, cuts each on whole sentences, frames it 9:16 on whoever's talking and captions every word in one of 5 animated styles. It also evens out every clip's loudness to −14 LUFS, with true peaks held to −1.5 dB, so a week of clips plays at one level. It doesn't remove noise or rebalance voices, so fix those in the video first.

For the rest of finishing a clip, from hook text to music under the voice, see short-form video editing.