Best News of the Year

The anti-loudness people keep claiming victory over and over because they keep realizing that they haven't actually won anything.
 
I posted something months ago about this--it was in SOS. The days of radically limited or compressed masters is going to end; anybody who wants to destroy their music by crushing the dynamics out of it will still be free to do so, but commercially released music will be automatically "leveled" so that making a louder mix will be irrelevant.
The article that the OP linked to is vague, to say the least. If you want to know more about the subject, and why it's in the air, so to speak, visit SOS's website and search for February 2014's "The End Of The Loudness War".
 
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miroslav said:
But it's only mid-February....we still have over 10 months to go, and there may be even better news to come.
Let's not end the optimism for the year now.
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Have you ever seen a movie that has some review that says "The best movie I've seen all year" or some such, and watched only to realize that it must have been the ONLY movie they watched...:)
 
Have you ever seen a movie that has some review that says "The best movie I've seen all year" or some such, and watched only to realize that it must have been the ONLY movie they watched...:)
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Many times lol
 
TimN said:
.... commercially released music will be automatically "leveled" so that making a louder mix will be irrelevant.
The article that the OP linked to is vague, to say the least. If you want to know more about the subject, and why it's in the air, so to speak, visit SOS's website and search for February 2014's "The End Of The Loudness War".
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The "end" of the war and what you are referring to from last year has to do with the iTunes streaming codes that now "level" everything to a set standard, and that is something that is slowly spreading to other streaming outlets....so that's why that article called it the "end" of the loudness war.
The Sweetwater blurb is referring to something esle...saying that artists/engineers are also starting to back off on the digital loudness, has claiming that the war is "over" 'cuz people are not trying to fight it anymore. They do it either because they are now hearing things differently, or because of the fact that their streamed music will now be leveled anyway, no matter how much loudness they put into it...hard to say which, or if it's both.

One thing that was stated about the streaming "levelers", is that because of them, if you now tried to pump up your loudness to extreme limits during mixing/mastering, it would sound worse post-levelers than if you made the levels more reasonable during mixing/mastering.

Of course...that applies to streaming. So, you can still jack up your levels as much as you want without any issues, just don't send the MP3s to iTunes. :D

I just find the whole thing rather funny and even cyclical...and I'm sure there will be more technology changes to follow.
I mix the way I mix, at the levels that sound good to me....not wimpy, and not crazy loud.
There's still a lot of room for many tastes...so not much to really worry about AFA "loudness".
 
Ah, the annual "the loudness wars are over" thread! Good times!

Doesn't the fact that streaming levels volumes off just mean that professional recordings need to be mastered again? Mastered for iTunes; mastered for every other streaming service; mastered for CD; mastered for vinyl; etc. :D
 
It probably will occur to some artists that music they had professionally squashed some time ago needs now to be re-mastered, or redone from the mix level up. And, no, songs would simply have to be re-mastered so the dynamic range isn't flattened into nothing. Older albums were (and are) re-mastered when transferred to the digital realm. There's nothing new about that. There's simply a standard in place, now, whereby commercial releases at streaming sites and other digital places are leveled for volume so that one doesn't have to keep turning the volume up and down whilst listening. The great byproduct is that it makes dynamics-crushing limiting and compressing a bad idea that has really negative consequences insofar as selling and listening goes.
 
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