hey drew... you're probably right... i need to go in and tweak the settings on the deesser i guess.. =]
I thought about normalizing it like you said to 0 but i figured it would be transparent, I mean i thought i'd hear distortion...
should i just normalize the final mix stereo interleaved file? or normalized each track seperately?...
the hurry is that i want it to be on itunes ASAP! lol... and I can't until its somewhat "mastered" =]
Well... Simply normalizing a file to 0dB, unless there's some acoustical/digital property that I'm not familiar with that I'm overlooking, shouldn't add any distortion. You're just taking something that already exists, and moving the samples such that the highest one is now at 0db, instead of wherever it was before (in practice, normalizing to -0.1dB might be a better idea just to leave yourself a tiny bit of extra room). It WILL raise your noise floor somewhat, as everything (including ambient noise and hiss) is getting boosted in volume, but assuming your tracks are decently recorded this shouldn't be a huge deal anyway. To answer your other question, I'd do this to the final mix, not each individual track.
Limiting, on the other hand, WILL introduce some distortion - effectively, what you're doing is lopping off the peaks of all your signals. This allows you to then boost the volume up a bit more (because now your peak is that much lower), but you're losing some of the transient. You can get a couple Db this way, probably, but past a point you begin to hear clipping. Most "volume maximizer" plugins are based on this principle, if I remember right - hard limiting + a volume normalization.
So really, I guess it depends on how much you want to spend. A professional mastering job (and what I'm talking about here is NOT mastering, but merely just making a track louder, closer to a commercial CD) is going to wipe the floor with anything you can do on your own with a few pro tools plugins and no prior experience, ten times out of ten. However, if your budget is $400, that means you have to sell 400 tracks on iTunes at $0.99 a piece to break even (more, probably, since iTunes gets a portion of that). So, I guess my thought would be to think long and hard about how realistic it is for you to sell 4-500 songs on iTunes. If you think you can do it, think you have some really good tunes that people will want to listen to and sound professionally recorded, and are willing to spend some time and effort promoting your music, then going pro is probably the better idea. If on the other hand you just want your tunes out there, but don't think selling 500 songs (which is a fair number) is feasible, then you might want to just try your hand at boosting the volume yourself.
I'll be tracking an album I've been working on and demoing for an embarrassingly long time shortly, and when I finish mixing it, I do plan on having it professionally mastered, and plan on setting aside a grand or two for it (or trying, haha, we'll see how things look when I get there). My reasoning is both kind of silly and a little selfish - I write instrumental guitar music, and there's just not that big a market for that. Even between all the guitar forums I run or post at (I play a seven string, which is kind of a niche field, so I'm pretty well known in the seven string internet community, and in fact my oft-delayed album is almost mythical now, sort of like our answer to Chinese Democracy
), I don't expect to sell even 500 copies. Given CD duplication costs, that's going to make it awfully hard to break even if I spring for a decent pro mastering job, but I've been working on this a long time, and when everything's said and done I just want to hold a totally pro looking and sounding CD in my hands and say "I did that."
That sounds all romantic and shit, but I'm basically spending several grand on an ego trip, you know?
