By SongTools.ai
Before a track goes out, two very different questions need answering: is the song itself actually good, and is the file technically ready for streaming. Here's how to check both from one upload.
"Is this ready to release?" is actually two separate questions wearing one trench coat. The first is creative: does the song work — structure, arrangement, hook, commercial positioning. The second is technical: is the file itself mastered correctly — loudness, stereo width, frequency balance, headroom for streaming platforms.
A track can absolutely fail one and pass the other. A brilliantly written, arranged, and performed song can still ship with a mix that's too quiet or too harsh for Spotify's loudness normalization to treat kindly. And a technically flawless master can still be sitting on top of a song that hasn't found its hook yet. Checking only one of these before release is how avoidable surprises happen after the fact.
This is what Song Feedback checks — not the technical file, but the song itself. Structure (does the intro earn attention, does the chorus pay off), arrangement (is anything competing for space it shouldn't be), lyrical clarity, and where it sits commercially relative to what's actually working in the market right now. You can set the tone from gentle to critical depending on how much you want softened — but the useful version of this is almost always the honest one, not the flattering one.
This is a narrower, more mechanical check: loudness (LUFS) targets for the major platforms, stereo width, frequency balance, and whether there's enough headroom left that a platform's own normalization doesn't do something unflattering to your file. This is the same kind of check a mastering engineer would eyeball before handing a file back to you — except instant, and something you can run as many times as you're revising.
Get the song feedback first. If the feedback flags something structural — a chorus that doesn't land, an arrangement issue — that's worth addressing before you spend time worrying about LUFS targets on a mix that might still change. Checking mastering readiness on a file you're about to substantially revise is checking the wrong version.
The Pre-Release Readiness Check Flow runs both of these against a single upload — feedback first, then the mastering check, in that order, with the credit cost for each step shown before you commit to it. It's the same two tools you'd use separately, just without uploading your file twice and losing track of which check you already ran.
If the feedback comes back strong but the mastering check flags an issue, that's a mix/master problem, not a songwriting one — usually solvable without touching the arrangement. If the feedback flags structural issues but the master reads clean, fix the song first; a perfectly loud file of a song that isn't landing yet doesn't help you. If both come back clean, that's about as close to a green light as an automated check can honestly give you.
All the tools discussed in this article are available on SongTools.ai — free to explore.