How to Prepare a Club Ready Music Track for YouTube

YouTube needs a video file, and Club Ready Music does not make one, so you turn the WAV and the cover JPEG into an MP4 yourself: a still image at 1920×1080 or 1080×1080 with the audio as AAC, made in any free video editor or ffmpeg-style converter. YouTube plays everything back at about −14 LUFS, so a DJ edit headed there should be built with Volume level at −14, and the cue times from cue points.txt turn into chapter markers in the description. The whole job takes ten minutes once the files are downloaded.

Steps

1. Download the audio and the cover

For a studio track, press DJ pack and unzip it; you need the WAV and "Artist - Title - cover.jpg", and cue points.txt for the chapters. For a DJ edit press WAV on the result panel. If you turned Also export 24-bit WAV off, use the MP3 320 instead; YouTube re-encodes anything you upload, and a 320 kbps source still comes through cleanly.

2. Set the loudness for a normalising platform

Decide the file's level before you build the video. A DJ edit for YouTube should be rebuilt with Volume level at −14, or −12 as a compromise if the same file also goes to a club crate; press Change settings & rebuild and change only the level. A studio track rendered at −8 LUFS will be turned down by about six dB on YouTube and sound no louder than a −14 file, but it keeps its −1 dBTP peaks, so it is not wrong, only wasteful of headroom. Drops are fixed at −8 and are turned down the same way.

3. Build the still image

The cover JPEG is square. For a 1920×1080 video, place it centred on a black or blurred background in your editor, or export the square as a 1080×1080 video and let YouTube letterbox it. Add the artist and title as text if you like; keep it inside the central area so mobile crops do not cut it. For a DJ edit, which has no cover, use your own square image.

4. Make the MP4

Import the image and the WAV into a free editor, set the image to last the full length of the audio, and export MP4 at 1920×1080 or 1080×1080, 30 frames per second, with AAC audio at 320 kbps and 48 kHz to match the WAV. An ffmpeg-style converter does the same with a loop of the image and the audio copied in; some tools also let you keep the WAV as uncompressed PCM inside a MOV or MKV, which YouTube accepts and which skips one encode. Check that the video starts at 0:00 with no black lead, because the track starts hard on beat one.

5. Write chapters from the cue points

YouTube turns a list of timestamps in the description into chapters when the first is 0:00 and there are at least three. Take them from cue points.txt or the comment tag: 0:00 Intro, the intro end time as the first full bar of the song, the first drop, the outro start. For a DJ edit the comment tag gives start, intro end and outro start, which is three chapters already. Round the m:ss.mmm values down to whole seconds.

6. Fill in the title and description

Use the TIT2 and TPE1 tags for the title, "Artist - Title (Extended Mix)" if you ticked the suffix. Put BPM and key in the description from the comment tag so DJs searching for a tempo can find it. Add the Club Ready Music share link /t/, which has the cover, a 30-second preview from the drop and an open Download MP3 button, as the place to get the file.

7. Check the upload

After processing, play the video next to a commercial upload at the same system volume. If yours sounds quieter, the source was below −14 LUFS and YouTube left it there; rebuild at −14. If the picture is soft, you exported below 1080 lines. If the audio is out of step with a waveform overlay, the editor trimmed the start; re-export with the image starting exactly at zero.

Tips

• Build the DJ edit at −14 LUFS for YouTube and a second one at −8 for your crate. Both come from the same upload via Change settings & rebuild.
• Keep the MP4 export at 48 kHz. Club Ready Music audio is 48 kHz, so a 44.1 kHz export adds a resample for nothing.
• A 1080×1080 export is smaller and faster and YouTube shows it with bars. Pick 1920×1080 only when you add a background.
• Write the chapter list in a text file as you go; it doubles as the tracklist for Mixcloud or a SoundCloud description.
• Club Ready Music has no scheduling or direct publishing. Upload by hand and use YouTube's own scheduling if you want a release time.

Common problems

• The track sounds quieter than others after upload. The file was below −14 LUFS and YouTube does not turn quiet files up. Rebuild a DJ edit at −14.
• The audio is a few frames late. Your editor placed the audio clip after the image start. Snap both to zero and re-export.
• Chapters do not appear. The first timestamp must be 0:00 and you need at least three, each at least ten seconds apart.
• The cover is stretched. It was scaled to 16:9. Pad the square image on a background instead of stretching it.