i mix it right,master with ozone but...

[lovenara]

i mix it right,master with ozone til it's so slamming ( with scope card )
but when i burn it to audioCD with nero or ashampoo the volume drops down lot
what did i do wrong?
thnx

[Uladine]

Are you judging the volume with your ears or with meters? It's easy to get the meters pumping, the challenge is to get it to "sound" loud(er) without smashing the holy hell out of it and ruining the mix you worked so hard at. It's a very complicated subject (mastering), and is arguably the most difficult aspect of audio engineering and most often best left to proffesionals with years and years of experience.

If you're just looking to pump up a home project a little bit, make sure theres not an abundance of unnecessary low end, as that will eat up your head room and get your meters slamming while your mix still "sounds" quiet. If you're trying to get your mix to a proffessional level with Ozone without smashing the life out of it, forget it. It's a great plugin, but it's still just a plugin. If it could do the same job as a real mastering engineer they probably would be selling it for thousands of dollars and MEs would be out of business.

[iqi616]

Originally Posted by lovenara

i mix it right,master with ozone til it's so slamming ( with scope card )
but when i burn it to audioCD with nero or ashampoo the volume drops down lot
what did i do wrong?
thnx

Are you listening back at a known loudnesses? You need to make sure that the CD playback is at the same loudness as the Ozone output. That way you can hear the results. Rip a track from a CD and adjust the output volumes so that the DAW output is the same loudness as the CD output.

[ecktronic]

Check what the RMS is after slamming the track. RMS is the average volume of the track.
Commercial rock CDs lie around -9 to -10dB usually. The highest I have seen is -6dB. QOTSA and System of a down seem to do this.

Eck

[Massive Master]

Let's keep in mind that even with a professional mastering environment (I hope that's self-explanatory), a VERY small percentage of projects are ever able to achieve that kind of volume efficiently. The kind of work that goes into producing recordings that can handle that sort of potential playback volume can be mind-boggling.

Personally, I wish they'd just go back to making recordings that sound "really good" instead of compromising everything to make them "really loud" - And I don't think I'm alone there.

[Ford Van]

I bet $20 that he has a soundcard outputting +4, and has a CD player hooked up in his monitoring chain too that is outputting -10.

Anyone take me on this?

[ecktronic]

YOu could try importing a commercial song that you like into your DAW and then match your song with the volume of that song. That way you cant really gpo wrong with getting a decent volume.

Eck

[xstatic]

Originally Posted by Ford Van

I bet $20 that he has a soundcard outputting +4, and has a CD player hooked up in his monitoring chain too that is outputting -10.

Anyone take me on this?

I would bet that like almost everyone else who seems to have this problem it is because they have their mixer settings internally for CD and file playback unmatched....

[lovenara]

hi
thnx all
will do what you suggest
BTW wherre can i find RMS in my sequencer?i use cubase
thnx lot

[ecktronic]

Select the wave, right click the wave, choose audio, choose statistics. Then at the very bottom is the Average RMS.

Eck

[NYMorningstar]

I'd bet that he is recording and way to hot to start with.

[masteringhouse]

Why does "mastering" so often seem to equate to "making music loud"?

The suggestions above are where I would start. Make certain that you are comparing apples to apples, same chain, same converter, etc.

When comparing my work to a commercial CD I will either import it into my DAW, or run a digital signal from my CD player into the DAW so that I'm using exactly the same playback components.

[lovenara]

very weird when i copy the audio track of DaveStewart that sound louder than mine on dvdplayer
the wavefile is lower than the -6dB line ,comparing to mine that nearly touch the 0 line almost all the time
and its volume is lower too
Any suggestions?
thnx

[SouthSIDE Glen]

Originally Posted by lovenara

i mix it right,master with ozone

There are some who would point out that if a project were mixed right, there'd be no need for Ozone.

Originally Posted by lovenara

very weird when i copy the audio track of DaveStewart that sound louder than mine on dvdplayer
the wavefile is lower than the -6dB line ,comparing to mine that nearly touch the 0 line almost all the time
and its volume is lower too
Any suggestions?

There a plethora of possible answers there that all have to do with signal chain and level quality in all this software you're using to move stuff to and from CD, listen to it from different sources with different playback software, and the futile effort to try and compare apples and oranges.

But there's also another factor that has to do with the human ear and how it perceives music (and sounds in gegeral.) Transient peaks hitting 0dBFS mean very little for perceived volume if there is not much between the peaks (a "low density" waveform). The average volume - RMS rating - of the waveform remains low.

OTOH, a "high density" waveform where there is a lot going on whether or not it has a lot of high peaks is going to have a high average volume - high RMS - and is going to be perceived as louder even if it's peaks don't reach as high.

In this case if the CD stuff only gets to -6dBFS but has an average volume of, say, -14dBRMS, it's going to sound louder than something that peaks at 0dbFS but only has an average volume -16dBRMS.

Now as to whether in your case the problem is that you are making misleading apple-to-orange comparisons becasue of signal chain discrepencies or because of actual differences in the density of the musical content, I don't know. Probably it's a bit of both.

G.