mixing down in sonar/hs2002

[mikew987]

My songs sound cool when played in cakewalk with my monitors but when I export it to a wave and burn it to cd and play it on a cd player it sounds like garbage. The volume also drastically decreases when I export it to wave. I have to turn the cd player way up to hear it at a good level. The volume meters in cakewalk are at a good level too. Whats the deal?

 

[timothydog]

I know where you are coming from.
When I first started recording and mixing with my computer my mixes would sound fine to me while I was doing it but when I exported and burned it to CD it was considerably quieter compared to a commercial CD. Next time you do a mix, keep a commercial CD handy set at normal volume and then A/B back and forth between your mix and the CD. This just gives you a good reference to keep in mind.

Make sure your master level in your mix window is going as loud as it can without peaking ever. To help you get an overall louder mix you can put a limiter on your master fader. This will give you better control of instruments that love to spike above and keep you from really pushing your levels. Try some light compression on some instruments too to keep things manageable. Be careful not to overdo it though. You don't want to squish it too much and lose your dynamics.

Another thing that will help you immensely is a mastering program like T-racks 24 or the Ozone plugin. No matter how much I squeeze and push my signal in Cakewalk, I can never get it as loud as T-racks can. Just export your song to a wav file and work with it in T-racks. This should help you get you a louder song.

 

[DDev]

Like Timothydog said, you really need an external mastering program to get your levels right. Sonar does a great job of mixing, but I don't think the normalizing function really works well for CD burning.

T-Racks is supposed to be great, but if you want to save $$ try the shareware program Goldwave (www.goldwave.com). It is just a 2-track editing program, but the mastering capabilities are pretty good. There is a volume maximizing function that gives you options of either taking the volume up based on peak level or in what they call percent RMS. If you use the percent RMS, and set it to 0.15 - 0.17 you'll wind up with audio files that have the same loudness as commercial CD's. You might have to add some slight compression to flatten out the digital peaks to avoid digital distortion, but that's easy also.

Good luck. Ain't digital audio just a blastaminute?

DDev.....