Best Way To Make Already Mastered Singles Into An Album
- Thread starter jaynm26
- Start date
Massive Master
www.massivemastering.com
No different than any other job except you're usually sort of "stuck" with what you have to some extent. Do what you can, do what you can "get away with" -- Make the quietest track at the volume you can and lower the louder ones.
Waltz Mastering
New member
I'm kinda with John on this one, because there's a lot less you can get away with.
Maybe use the best of the lot to match up to and use subtractive eq to finesse the rest in to place for continuity ...and also a very slight safety limiter and re-dither. Almost always an itb job for me, there's not a lot of reason to go out when the songs should sound half decent to begin with.
Maybe use the best of the lot to match up to and use subtractive eq to finesse the rest in to place for continuity ...and also a very slight safety limiter and re-dither. Almost always an itb job for me, there's not a lot of reason to go out when the songs should sound half decent to begin with.
witzendoz
Senior Member
I had to do this once for a computation CD for a charity event. I think 18 songs all from different performers, some mastered some not some recorded at home some at studios and a live track. Also various formats, some came on an audio CD so they were 16bit, some came as Wav 24 bit some 16 bit, one Aiff and one came as a file that we could not even open, lucky a mac laptop in the studio opened it and converted it to wav (still don't know what it was?).
The mastered songs I pretty much left alone, if they had been mastered very hot (some actually peaked the meters) I dropped the volume to -0.3dB. The songs that had been mastered a bit soft I brought up a bit to match the louder ones. And the ones that were not mastered were EQed and fiddled to fit in with the mastered songs.
When I had the album playing so that the track volumes worked, I.E ballads were not louder than rock tracks, I then inserted a very mild limiter across the whole thing but had it set so that input was - 0.4 and the output at -0.3db, that made the limiter just grab any wayward peaks and actually just seemed to make the tracks sound even more like it was an album.
The album was well received and a few of the artists commented on how good their songs sounded on the CD.
Alan.
The mastered songs I pretty much left alone, if they had been mastered very hot (some actually peaked the meters) I dropped the volume to -0.3dB. The songs that had been mastered a bit soft I brought up a bit to match the louder ones. And the ones that were not mastered were EQed and fiddled to fit in with the mastered songs.
When I had the album playing so that the track volumes worked, I.E ballads were not louder than rock tracks, I then inserted a very mild limiter across the whole thing but had it set so that input was - 0.4 and the output at -0.3db, that made the limiter just grab any wayward peaks and actually just seemed to make the tracks sound even more like it was an album.
The album was well received and a few of the artists commented on how good their songs sounded on the CD.
Alan.
Mo Facta
Farts of Nature
Yeah, there are two ways you could approach it:
1. Find the loudest track and match all others to it, or
2. Find the softest track and bring the loud ones down.
The Meta-Normalizer does this pretty well. You just gotta check subjectively with your ears.
If there are unmastered tracks, a they'll have to be processed case-by case.
Cheers
1. Find the loudest track and match all others to it, or
2. Find the softest track and bring the loud ones down.
The Meta-Normalizer does this pretty well. You just gotta check subjectively with your ears.
If there are unmastered tracks, a they'll have to be processed case-by case.
Cheers