Apologies Tod, I think I pretty much have it figured out by now. I wasn't trying to complicate, I was just talking about the mixdown submission guideline since I've never formally rendered to those specs:
a master mix (
limited to -0.5 dB and at -14 LUFS): MP3 320kps
LUFS is loosely similar to DR and dB RMS, but smarter and takes the entire song into account. So -14 dbFS RMS would be similar but it isn't as smart as a meter that uses LUFS calculations since LUFS considers the entire song, not just a sliding sample window - it has other things it uses for the calculations as well but we don't need to worry about that.
You can use Orban and there are probably other freebies. I like Orban for some tasks because I can just render my master and load it in orban to check but you can also do it in real time if your sound card can loop back.
http://www.orban.com/orban/meter/
If you need help I'm sure we can figure it out. What this does is ensure every submission will be the same overall loudness and there will be no need for David to try to level match multiple mix submissions so they can be evaluated properly when listening. It's more confusing at first than it is difficult.