Cool Edit for Mastering?

[Genie]

Hello, i'm a cakewalk user but i just got cool edit also because i was told that people use it to master their mixes. While i realize that you can't do professional quality mastering with this software, i'm sure you can do a lot. does anybody have any tips or suggestions on using cool edit pro for this purpose. Do you use it to work with single wav files that were pre-mixed in a multitracker, or do you work with entire sequences. any help would be appreciatied.

 

[dobro]

Hi, Genie. I know nothing about mastering, not having reached that stage yet. However, there's this interesting thread to look at, if you use CEP:

https://homerecording.com/bbs/showthread.php?threadid=17313

The posts by Strmkr and Mixmkr talk about using Cool Edit at the mastering stage. One final comment: one of these guys also mentions Normalizing as usual procedure. However, Sonusman (experienced and respected engineer on this board) holds the opinion that normalizing is a waste of time. The thread was in the Mixing Forum, I think - do a search and you might find it, and you can make up your own mind on that one.

 

[Kelly Holdridge]

I'm big on hard limiting after EQ has been set. It's under "volume", I think...

Probably the best choice if you were on an island and could only have one mastering tool...

-K.

 

[mastahnke]

I use CEP to record and mix/master my songs. I think it works just fine. Some of the standard CEP pluggins are really nice, others are not so much. I recomend T-Racks, (Stand alone program) for finalizing, putting on final compression and limiting and such, but getting the levels and panning and timing and really everything in CEP is quite easy and exact. It takes lots of patience, but so does recording properly.
MIKE

 

[mrclay]

From what I've read of mastering (see digido.com!) cooledit doesn't sound like it'd be all that great for the job for a real professional, but you and I can at least "post-mix" our songs with it if we can't afford real mastering. The best tools do seem to be the real-time sprectrum analyzer and parametric EQ. Once you get a good sounding spectrum you can use statistics to see what your average RMS level is and use hard limit w/ gain to bring it up to around -14dB, which is a pretty typical volume level allowing plenty of dynamic range for most pop music. Though I went crazy with it when 1st mixing my recordings now I only use very subtle compression on various instruments in the mix and basically none on the final mix. Join the rebellion against over compressed "radio ready" recordings!