If normalizing is all anyone wants, that's easy. Hell, that can be done as a batch. But who's song do you normalize too? The loudest? Maybe my submitted song would benefit from a more mellow level.
And, what if the loudest one was a really bad mix?
All these questions, and no producer to settle it.
Dragon?
Slackmaster?
Who will step up and play producer? Having one certainly makes the productions staffs job easier because they just follow orders. The producer has made the tough decisions, based upon the artists goals. Whether the artist agree's with the producer is another question. Get my point.
If consistency is the goal, then there would definately need to be a producer to smooth over the inevitable conflicts between artistic view, and production limitations based upon facilities and/or budget. In this case I don't think that facilities is the problem as much as budget. It is obvious that some tracks are gonna need a lot of work to get them into the ballpark of the better sounding tracks. In some cases, it may not even be possible.
I just worked on a mastering project for a local producer. He recorded and mixed the project. Him not being much of a mixing engineer has made the job of doing a quickie mastering job, which is what he wanted, impossible. Each song is so sonically different. Aside from that, on some of the tunes the low end is so loud that normal techniques could not work as far as compression and or eq.
He thought it would be as easy as a tweek of eq and a few volume changes to make it all fly. Not a chance on this one. Trying to get it all to sound like it had even a small amount of consistency with quick methods was impossible. Oh well.
I am bringing this up to illustrate a point. Mastering CAN be a lot of things. In the above case, it wound up being a quicky thing, but certainly, if the client was willing to pay for a more thourough job, it could have sounded really good. But it doesn't. They had their budget. The bands lack of experience in recording, as well as the producers limited ability of mixing somewhat level on a budget hurt the project, as well as the budget. I mean, I have a full on mastering job I am still working on of one of the songs. It is about 6 db hotter than the original, and with a better overall eq. But, this has taken several hours because different processes have had to be applied at differnt points in the song to smooth out the mix. This is stuff that takes a lot of time to do. It works reasonable well, but it still takes time.
So, if a noramization of all the submitted songs is all that is needed, and someone can play producer and figure out which song they will all be normalized to, then piece of cake. I would do that.
Personally though, I feel that the CD should reflect what was originally done by the submitter. The idea of Home Recording .com is to provide information and a forum for people of different skill levels and knowledge to come together and discuss recording so that all may gain, whether they gain knowledge, as sence of purpose for helping, of justification of good/bad things that happen while recording.
I pulled back from my original offer because 1- too much time investment. 2- I didn't feel it would reflect what this BBS is all about. 3- Who would really care on a potentially none profit project like this?
Personally, if I submitted, I would not want anything done to my song. I don't care if Bob Ludwig or Bernie Grundman was mastering it. There is little to no financial gain for being involved with this project. And since I am trying to improve my skills in all aspects of recording, it seems to make more sence to have a "as is" type CD. My finished product would not be up for review for all. Certainly I would love to hear what other peoples stuff sounds like in real 16 bit 44.1kHz format than the crappy sounding mp3's that I normally hear.
If you think about it, having a "as is" CD could foster interaction that was not possible before.
Let's say that "Joe" a junior member here submits a song. It sounds ok, but it is not really anywhere in the ball park with "Sam's" submit. With mp3 compression, and varying monitor setup's of all the submitters, there would be no way for Joe and Sam to REALLY talk about their respective songs because the original audio is corrupt from the mp3 compression. But with a "as is" CD, Sam would be able to REALLY hear what is going on through his killer monitors and possibly help Joe improve his skills. Inversely, Joe would have a CD quality version of Sam's mix to compare his own to. Maybe this inspire's Joe to change whatever to produce better mixes. But if Joe can only download a shabby quality mp3 of Sam's music, how can he really hear the difference.
Belive it or not, all of my mp3's are actually mastered differently than what I print to disk. Why? Because mp3's do not have the same fidelity and depth of CDDA files. They can't! That is the draw back of any compression scheme concerning audio. You lose something to create the smaller files. This is a fact of life. Hell, compare a bitmap to a TIFF file. There is a difference. For some applications that would be okay because the viewer may not be able to appriciate the difference, or in the case of like a website, the high quality TIFF is way too large for downloading without going on vacation before it actually gets done downloading.....
So anyway, I just see more value in a "as-is" CD.
I will still offer mastering at $20 an hour, 1/2 hour min. for those that may choose to do that (but only for songs submitted to this CD project).
Ed
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