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PowerPress publishes your episode and owns the feed; it does not measure the audio. Here is where a loudness check belongs in a PowerPress workflow, and what to look at before the episode goes out.
PowerPress is the most-installed podcasting plugin for WordPress — over six million downloads — and it does publishing thoroughly: the media enclosure, the feed, Podcasting 2.0 tags, multiple destinations. What it does not do is listen to the file. Nothing in PowerPress will tell you this episode is 6 LU quieter than the last one, so that check has to come from somewhere else, before you hit publish.
This is not a criticism. Publishing and audio measurement are different jobs, and PowerPress is clear about which one it does — its plugin listing mentions loudness, LUFS and true peak exactly zero times.
| Step | Handled by PowerPress |
|---|---|
| Media enclosure and episode metadata | Yes |
| RSS feed, including Podcasting 2.0 tags | Yes |
| Player, subscribe links, destinations | Yes |
| Statistics (via Blubrry) | Yes |
| Is the episode loud enough? | No |
| Will it clip on playback? | No |
| Is there dead air in it? | No |
A podcast feed is a promise that a specific file sits at a specific URL. PowerPress writes that enclosure when you publish, and from that second on the file is out of your hands: apps fetch it, listeners download it, and a replacement only reaches people who have not downloaded it yet.
The failure is rarely dramatic. It is one episode mixed on headphones at a different level, and listeners meet it as a volume jump — they reach for the dial, and next week they are already primed to. What is worth protecting is consistency across the back catalogue, and that is cheap to protect while the post is still a draft.
A desktop meter does the same job. The reason to do it on the publishing screen is that a check living where you already work is one nobody forgets — which, for a weekly show, matters more than the measurement itself.
No. PowerPress handles episode publishing, the media enclosure, the player and the RSS feed — including Podcasting 2.0 tags and destination management. Its wordpress.org listing does not mention loudness, LUFS, true peak or audio normalisation anywhere. Whatever file you attach is what ships to listeners.
Between attaching the media file and publishing the episode. PowerPress writes the enclosure into the feed at publish time, so that is the last moment where changing the file costs nothing.
You can replace the file, but the feed has already gone out. Podcast apps have fetched the enclosure, and anyone who downloaded the episode keeps the version they got. Re-uploading fixes future downloads, not past ones.
No. PowerPress owns publishing: the feed, the enclosure, the destinations. AudioLinter measures and repairs the audio file itself. They sit next to each other on the same editor screen.
Integrated loudness against your platform's target (−16 LUFS for Apple Podcasts, about −14 for Spotify and YouTube), true peak at or below −1 dBTP, and no long silent stretches. Those three catch what listeners actually notice.
