Doubt about limiter and mastering tracks at home.

andrushkiwt said:
So what is CMo's RMS in more common numbers? -10?
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His "-7" would be "-10"...IF it's that simple. If it is, then that means that his "-5" is actually "-8". I haven't had a chance to listen, but even with more common metering, that still seems ludicrously loud.
 
bouldersoundguy said:
Loud:
9.78/9.90 in Sound Forge 6
6.8/6.9 in TT DR Meter

Not so loud:
13.63/13.72 in Sound Forge 6
10.6/10.7 in TT DR Meter
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Well that surely wasnt as loud as I thought, especially the "Not So Loud" one.

Anyway, the "Loud as Hell"...I still cant get my head around the fact that I hear some kind of weird compression happening. Its driving me crazy because I really dont know where it comes from.
 
CMolena said:
Well that surely wasnt as loud as I thought, especially the "Not So Loud" one.

Anyway, the "Loud as Hell"...I still cant get my head around the fact that I hear some kind of weird compression happening. Its driving me crazy because I really dont know where it comes from.
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I think it comes from trying to use a compressor. A lot of that stuff you're trying to emulate is simply clipped in mastering. Some is clipped in analog (you can see the jagged flat tops and bottoms) and some digitally (dead flat tops and bottoms). I've done mastering jobs where my references were QUOTSA, Foo Fighters etc. and that's what I found when I looked at their waveforms.
 
andrushkiwt said:
do you have a....compressor on it? :D
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No, actually I dont! The only difference between the mixes are how the threshold level of the limiter is set.

I have compressors on some parts of the drums...like kick, snare and I do compressed the bass too. But that's about it.
 
bouldersoundguy said:
I think it comes from trying to use a compressor. A lot of that stuff you're trying to emulate is simply clipped in mastering. Some is clipped in analog (you can see the jagged flat tops and bottoms) and some digitally (dead flat tops and bottoms). I've done mastering jobs where my references were QUOTSA, Foo Fighters etc. and that's what I found when I looked at their waveforms.
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But do you think that I can achieve the same level of loudness without squashing up the mix as I think it is?
 
Compressor, limiter, whatever. It's not fast enough to avoid causing audible pumping. If you want those levels without the pumping you need faster settings. Clipping the waveform is as fast as it gets but there are consequences.

Other options include limiting things in the mix and multiband compression, each with their own consequences.
 
Ahem...
ashcat_lt said:
There's no reason that you can't get levels similar to commercial recordings at home. If you have some experience and knowledge you should be able to get there without making any more of a mess of the thing than the "big boys" do. Obviously you don't have that knowledge or experience, but the only way to get it is to keep trying, and failing, but hopefully getting a little closer easy time.

To get the least possible dynamic range at the master stage, you really have to control the dynamics at every stage of the process. Ideally it starts with arrangement, then with tight erformances, then you dial in sounds at amps and whatever, then compress and limit each track, then in groups, and then finally on the master.

But I said "compress" and "limit". A slower, less aggressive compressor will help you inflate your RMS and bring the varying peak levels closer to some norm without really crushing them, so that the more aggressive limiter doesn't have to work quite so hard overall, and works more consistently. I use a really long RMS window and set the pre-comp/lookahead in the middle of that, and it's almost too easy to get absurd loudness that sounds surprisingly good.
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I listened to both. I wanted to download them and see what numbers I get, but I'm not going to join SC just to download.

But anyway, yeah the "really loud" one is hard to listen to. It's pumping, distorting, and generally falling apart. The other one is much better.

Like a few people said, you can get "commercial" levels with a home recording, but it's not that simple. The mix has to be good enough to be able to to stand up to extreme limiting, and I consider the levels you're shooting for to be extreme, in my opinion.

If a mix doesn't stand up to limiting, then the problem isn't with the limiter, the plug-in, the DAW, or anything else other than the mix itself. Starting from the tracking to the arrangement, to the sounds used to the performance, etc....All those factors are responsible for allowing a mix to stand up to limiting.

The band wants you to make it louder, but they probably don't understand that it's not as simple as they think.
 
andrushkiwt said:
elaborate?
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First of all, I pretty much only ever use ReaComp. There are other plugs out there which include RMS time and lookahead, but don't ask me to name them. :)

Here's quote from a thread on the Reaper forum:
I've been using a technique lately for a very transparent kind of volume leveling. It works well for vocals (a lot like that VocalRider plugin, I think), but I also do it right on the Master to get a bit more "loudness" without losing so much transient information. The trick is to set the RMS window pretty big, but then set the pre-comp to somewhere around half the RMS window. This way, the compressor is reacting to the average level around the current sample - both past and future - so that if one bear is significantly louder than the next, it sort of gently dips the volume leading into the louder hit, and then comes back up afterwards in a pretty natural way. Attack and release are basically built into the process, so I'll set those parameters to 0, and I usually use a very low ratio - 1.1 or 1.2. Then, for even greater transparency, I'll usually set the threshold so that it just barely starts squishing on some of the louder parts, and then crank the knee where up so that it's almost always doing just a tiny bit, but it's almost always in the knee, and almost never hits the full ratio. I sometimes try to calculate the time constants to cover a beat or two of the song's tempo, but I've found that it's not super critical, as long as it's pretty long. Pre-comp only goes to 250ms, I think, so that limits things a little. All of the really fast transients still get through with the same proportional relationship compared to what's going on around them, but the overall dynamic range is reduced very transparently.


Edit - it's worth at least mentioning that the RMS level of anything that's not a square wave is always less than its peak level. At least to a certain point, the longer you set the RMS window, the lower the level that hits the detector and shows on the meter, and the lower the threshold needed to get the same amount of gain reduction. It can be kind of tough to A/B different RMS sizes, or even say for sure where any perceived differences are coming from.
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This from another:
Realize that RMS is an average over time, and can in fact be completely different depending on how long the window is set to. It should probably be obvious that some time has to pass before the RMS level is even close to relevant, and unless you use some lookahead mechanism, you will always be adjusting today's volume based on yesterday's levels.

Consider that when you first push play the RMS level starts at 0 and ramps up so that even if the first whack is super loud, it won't be attenuated until the window catches up. In fact, its response will always lag behind the actual "loudness" by the length of the window.

ReaComp provides controls for both the window and the lookahead time. I have found that setting the lookahead very close to half of the RMS window can give some really smooth sounding leveling. You can kind of use the difference between the lookahead and half-window as a weird sort of complimentary attack/release control. The lookahead thing only goes to 250ms, so your total RMS window can't be longer than 500ms (if you really want to get that half thing right...) but that is usually plenty. The RMS window will go quite a bit longer, though, and if you really wanted to get whacky you could do some trickery with side chaining and delay plugs to make your own lookahead.
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Does that help?
 
RAMI said:
Also, how do you figure out crest factor with those "other" meters?
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Crest factor is the difference between peak and RMS. If a tune is peaking at -0.0dBFS and RMS is around -10dB(FS)RMS, the crest factor is 10dB. Same as if it were peaking at -5 dBFS and RMS is around -15dB(FS)RMS.
 
Massive Master said:
Crest factor is the difference between peak and RMS. If a tune is peaking at -0.0dBFS and RMS is around -10dB(FS)RMS, the crest factor is 10dB. Same as if it were peaking at -5 dBFS and RMS is around -15dB(FS)RMS.
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hehe...I know what crest factor is. I'm don't know if you might have missed part of the conversation, but there was talk of a different kind of metering for RMS, which brings levels up by about 3db.
 
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