Looking at some tracks, and then mine...

[Rock Star 87]

Hey guys. I had a small question that developed in my head the other day. I was looking at some professionally mixed and mastered tracks in Audacity, and I was wondering why there tracks are maxed out, it basically looks like a square box right below the clip line. Mine are all over the place. What the hell????

The first song is "Get Up / Dustin Werner, Seth Sweger, Timothy Varnell, Susan Stevens.

The second song is "Heard Em' Say / Kanye West w/ Adam Levine.

The Picture

 

[RawDepth]

(I think you need to rename your picture file with .jpg at the end before people can view it.)

I did view your picture and it looks pretty typical. The higher up the scale your blue lines go, the louder the volume. They achieve that high volume by compressing the gutts out of the audio (reducing and leveling peaks) and then turning up the output gain till everything almost hits the ceiling. Most of us don't like it that way, but unfortunately it has become standard practice for the commercial market.

You can force your music files to look like that too but they will probably have no dynamics left in them. In other words, all passages in the song will be the same volume.

 

[Massive Master]

If you have *your* tracks professionally mixed and mastered, you too can have a waveform that looks like a skating rink.

 

[cusebassman]

Yeah, you are seeing the technical result that is associated with what everyone around here gripes about in regard to modern music... take every last instrument and sound effect, and flatten out the dynamic range, crank the gain to just below 0dB, then mix everything together. Then, make sure the stereo endresult doesn't clip anywhere, and throw some compression/limiting on THAT!

Its odd though to listen to something you've recorded after doing that to it... I recorded just a simple acoustic + vocals rendition of Don't Think Twice, and the bridge of the song goes from a simple 2 measures of C to C7... and it gets nice and quiet there to good effect. When I compress the Hell out of the end result, that gets magnified and sounds rather boring. But it sounds 'modern'!!!

 

[SouthSIDE Glen]

When I compress the Hell out of the end result, that gets magnified and sounds rather boring. But it sounds 'modern'!!!

Ain't no use to sit and wonder why, babe. It don't matter anyhow.



G.

 

[cusebassman]

Ain't no use to sit and wonder why, babe. It don't matter anyhow.



G.

hehe not at all... home recording shall bring back the concept of dynamics!! Let the war begin...