making a track louder without quality loss

T

transmission

New member
hey i have a song and its really quiet but good quality. im obviously using cool edit. anyway, i was wondering if tehre was a way to make it louder without quality loss?


thanks!!
 
Hi transmission - what is the bit depth of your mix ?

Also if you select the entire wave and get the waveform statistics can you note the 'average rms' and 'peak amplitude' ?

thanks,
kylen
 
Turn up the overall mix volume. If the track you recorded was clipping, then you won't get any distortion by turning up the overall volume - it'll just get louder.
 
What is the maximum you can turn up the master volume to, to avoid distortion? It defaults to 0db, and I thought anything above zero db was bad in recording.
 
0 dB is the magic line when you're recording. Anything over that in computer recording, and you're distorting usually, and it sounds really ugly.

But when you've finished recording and you start mixing, you can do what you like with an individual track - boost it, cut it, go up to +15 dB, drop it down to -15 dB. Of course, the trick is to get a nice balance between all the tracks. Once you get the balance between the tracks, then you have to start paying attention to that 0 dB line again for the entire mix, cuz the idea when you mixdown is to get the track as loud as it needs to be without distorting.
 
Hi dobro. What is preferred? Adjusting all the individual tracks' levels higher OR raising the mixed down level? The reason I ask is, when doing the latter, I've found I really can't raise it too much or else it will clip at some point.
 
While you're working in Multitrack, it doesn't matter much what volume you set each individual track at, just as long as the relative levels produce a good result. Cuz when it's time to mixdown, you can simply adjust the master volume control to get the overall mix level just right, so that the peaks are hitting at about - 1 dB or so.

And then, after you've mixed down, if the mixdown isn't loud enough for you, you can always do the old 'hard-limit-then-normalize' routine in Edit View to boost everything a bit.
 
dobro said:
While you're working in Multitrack, it doesn't matter much what volume you set each individual track at, just as long as the relative levels produce a good result
Click to expand...

Actually, in multitrack when I raise a track's level fader too much, the VU meter at the bottom of the screen shows it to be clipping and in the red. So, are you saying ignore that until the final mix?
 
I've seen the multitrack meter go into the red lotsa times, and I can't hear distortion. Maybe that's because it hasn't gone too far into the red and so there isn't much distortion - dunno. But if you can't hear any distortion, then it isn't an issue, right? Not at the Multitrack stage, anyway. But when it comes time to mixdown, and everything goes into Edit view, I pay *lots* of attention to levels to keep them under the clip line.
 
my xp has always been this:
if your in the red consistantly, the mix will sound bad. i never let anything get above 0. you can get away with it a little more when using tape, but with digital, red = bad :).

for guitar tracks, i find a small amount of compression will add a lot to the track without adding distortion / bad funkeyness.
 
kylen said:
Hi transmission - what is the bit depth of your mix ?

Also if you select the entire wave and get the waveform statistics can you note the 'average rms' and 'peak amplitude' ?

thanks,
kylen
Click to expand...

ok Kylen. For my audio file:

Average RMS Power: -12.95 dB(Left) -12.43 dB(Right)
Peak Amplitude: 0db (L+R)

So what does this mean?

Thank you,
Behz
 
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