Excellent! LIked that one a lot! Sonically and musically. You're definitely on point with this one!
You mentioned SoundCloud altering your levels. If you're using Studio One, their latest dot release (5.5) includes the ability to finalize your project to the target loudness in use by a bunch of streaming services. It requires use of the Project Page rather than just the song page, but it's not terribly difficult to master, or so I'm told. I haven't yet ventured into that section of the update.
Here's a link from Joe Gilder at Presonus that explains it. It's an overall list of changes in this release, but I time stamped the link so you don't have to listen to everything that comes before it.
https://youtu.be/hgimSNr1QRM?t=376
Thanks Papa,
I saw that new feature, haven't used it yet.
Need to study exactly what they are doing.
Some of the "Experts" I subscribe to suggest it's a waist of time to adjust your volume to match their requirements because, they are going to run it through their system anyway............So I'm cloudy on that point.
Having said that, I do use the "Project Page" in S1 for all my streaming music submissions.
It is very helpful, particularly for adding album art and metadata that follows the track for royalties tracking.
Also, it's a great tool for publishing albums.
Although, as of late, I'm only releasing single songs, on those occasions where I have released albums, It helps you get consistency across tracks and organize their appearance in the album.
I should note that, I'm far from a mastering guru but, I can say that any changes you make to the entire finished track need to be gentle, it's easy to think some loudness is helping when in fact, it can mess things up pretty quickly.