Professional Sound Volume

Am i overlooking something easy? my recordings always come out quieter than professionally done cd's!

Brilliantly written, yep.

Here's the thing with "regular folks". They are accustomed to putting a CD in the player and having it be near the volume of the last CD. Touching the volume knob seems like an inconvenience. :( Me: "Here man, check out this mix of __________'s new song." Him (good friend, not musician engineer): "Cool, I'll let you know." Me (later): "How did you like it?" Him: "It sounded great. I did notice though, it's not as loud as my other CD's." Me: ... So part of the problem with *music* mixes is the idea of relativity. Throw your CD into the auto changer with commercial music at a party and you will be going to the stereo to turn it up as the *relative* volume difference will throw everyone off. Then when the next commercial song comes on you'll be turning the stereo down again. This is one situation where you don't want to be going to the stereo every 3 minutes to change the volume. So aside from the problem of squashing the dynamics you have the practical problem of relative volume when played alongside products who squeeze the life out of their music and make it loud as hell.

You could try some of these (assuming you're on PC) []=e&type[]=78&f[]=dx&f[]=vst&win=1&free=1&com=1&sf=0&receptor=&de=0&sort=1 &rpp=100 (a search for mastering-plugins on KVR) Use them as inserts on the master.

Thanks! Thread bookmarked for linking to it when this very F A'ed Q comes up next (tomorrow or next week at the latest). :)

Some pointers, although I'm out of my league here. Load Come as Are by Nirvana into an audio editor. See how, even though it never comes too close to zero,it is a loud song. It does not have a flattened top like modern mixes often do. This is because the EQ is well balanced and from using compressors on individual tracks rather than brickwall limiting on the master. You want to try to minimize the initial transient on things like the snare drum where you have this couple ms spike at the beginning. Look at the editor again and you will notice that the Nirvana song still has those transients as the loudest thing just reduced from the 15db higher they might have been on the initial track. You don't want to just clip those off with a limiter on the master buss. You want to use compression on the initial track with a very fast attach. Experiment with the ratio and the threshold till you can't really hear the difference but when rendered the track looks like something out of a sample library. On the Nirvana tune they probably could have got a couple more DB volume out of the cd by compressing those snare transients at the source without ruining the song but once you put the brickwall limiter on top of that you have reached the point of diminishing returns and every DB added to the volume of the CD will detract from the quality of the sound.

Oh, sorry, I didn't mean to neglect your advices, sorry for that! The method you're describing makes sence. Basically you're turning down the highest transients so the master limiter can give more "power" to the rest of the soundspectrum, but wouldn't it be necesary to do some side-chaining with the rest of the instruments when working with wall-of-sound material (like the example you mentioned)?

for awhile i was trapped in thinking that preserving transients was the important part, or sometimes even 'creating' transients that werent there before (by using a 20ms attack..) was the idea, but now i get it, the transients are sometimes the enemy. now i am enlightened on this facet of mixing. i am a big dummy sometimes. it has taken me years to begin to understand compression! its such a... well, DYNAMIC tool that there seems to be infinite applications!

yep for the president 

Besides the loudness race one more thing is worrying me. Yep can write faster than I can read so it seems. :-) Few hours ago I wanted to compress my tracks but now somehow I don't care that much. I personally love good old recordings and I can listen to them with no problem even as OGGs in my iRiver... funny thing is that I don't have a problem to listen to Get A Grip by Aerosmith right away after it - though I admit - it is a bit tiresome, now I know why. Maybe that's why my wife can't tell why she doesn't like to be around when I listen to it. Hm... I'm sort of lost in it now. I can't even push vocals into the front properly, not to compress it just the right bit, so I just give it more time for now and continue hunting yep's posts in "Why...ass" thread.