noob mixing question
- Thread starter spridle
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chrisharris
King of Bling
You shouldn't be making an album of mp3's, but setting that aside for the moment, your real question is sort of about mastering. What many people do is play their mixes and compare them with a commercial song and make sure the volume levels are comparable. If not, then the home recordist typically slaps on a limiter and compresses his mix until its every bit as squished and lifeless as the commercial mix.
i guess what i could do is just get one of my recorded songs mixed down to one track, and import an artists track and compare the waves of both tracks and make mine equal to the artists track. does "normalizing" to a certain db work for making a track the right volume/etc? i thought i read somewhere that's how you do it?
gecko zzed
Grumpy Mod
The short answer is that you don't. What you do is mix the song so that it sounds as good as you can possibly make it. You then do a bounce or render to a WAV file. After this comes a process (mastering) in which you sort out the overall level of the track, do a bit of housekeeping (e.g. cleaning up the beginnings and endings, maybe some other adjustments if necessary). When you are happy with this, you then convert to an MP3. But if you are making a CD, you shouldn't be using MP3s, you should be using the WAV file.
gecko zzed
Grumpy Mod
ooops . . . I see Chris Harris has already answered. I started to write a response and got distracted, then by the time I got back to it, others had already responded.
Bobbsy
Boring Old Git
First, you mix by listening.
Then you mix down to a wave file.
Then you do (or get somebody else to do) some mastering.
Then you burn a CD.
Then, if you need MP3 versions for some reason, you convert the completed masters to MP3.
All the commercial MP3s you can buy were mixed and mastered in high quality wave formats and only then converted to MP3 for cheap sales on the internet.
Yeah, I better go on record as saying I hate MP3. I consider it the work of the devil. For about a hundred years of audio recording we had successive technological developments to make things sound better. Suddenly, with MP3, we have a development designed to make good mixes sound muffled and artificial--purely to let people store quantity rather than quality on their mobile players...and let record companies sell them cheap on the internet.
Bob
Then you mix down to a wave file.
Then you do (or get somebody else to do) some mastering.
Then you burn a CD.
Then, if you need MP3 versions for some reason, you convert the completed masters to MP3.
All the commercial MP3s you can buy were mixed and mastered in high quality wave formats and only then converted to MP3 for cheap sales on the internet.
Yeah, I better go on record as saying I hate MP3. I consider it the work of the devil. For about a hundred years of audio recording we had successive technological developments to make things sound better. Suddenly, with MP3, we have a development designed to make good mixes sound muffled and artificial--purely to let people store quantity rather than quality on their mobile players...and let record companies sell them cheap on the internet.
Bob
would you happen to be interested in mastering a song i'm working on after i mix it and export it to a single wave file?
Presuming the finished wav is maxed out (-.3dbFS or wherever you like to land) might we want to insert 'reduce the level a bit' going into the mp3 convert?