#324

Getting a lot of good information from this thread. Mixing has always been a little mystified to me, as i never really understood where the boundaries were/ how far to go with it…

As i’ve been referencing my mixes for an album i’m working on, i’ve been thinking a lot about “For Emma, Forever Ago” by Bon Iver. I knew that it was a minimal operation with great sound, but I had no idea that the majority of the album was tracked on a SM57(!!!) through a very standard interface. The album has such a vibe, and it was tracked on like, the most accessible recording rig possible.

For me that has kind of informed how powerful mixing and mastering really can be, and has been a driving factor to work extra super hard on mixing, because i know similar quality is possible on my current equipment. Also, kind of liberating to know mixing can be more than slaping a couple EQs down and hitting stuff with compressors… (Engineers in the room probably laughing at me, but for the indie folks… :smiley: )

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#325

i remember a major aha moment for me, reading a bon iver interview about for emma. within a couple paragraphs my mind was doubly blown learning that it had been done with the distinctly budget/digital setup of an sm57, mbox, and light version of pro tools - and that everything on the record that i had up to then regarded as “warm” or “tape-y” was achieved by basically rolling off a ton of high end.

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#326

Love that story. As a student, I remember being in a class (sound design, post production mind) where a tutor was playing back a film mix. Everyone was saying how great the reverb was, expecting it to be the latest ‘pro’ plugin (Waves was on trend then…) . Turned out to be D-verb, everywhere. He could mix a film better than any of us using only the native plugins. It was a real eye opener!

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#327

Yes, ideas and experience trump gear every single time.

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#328

In case somebody else is looking for a followup on this, here’s an extensive analysis on the mic placement and other things on that record:

https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/MC/article/download/20212/23314/

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#329

for some thoughts on vinyl mastering i found this interview with Rashad Becker a total eye and ear opener, both in terms of technicalities i’d never considered but also his aesthetic approach -

(also a musician i know who’s had a few albums mastered by him said they couldn’t believe how quietly Rashad listens when mastering)

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The Tiny Studio Corner Thread
#330

Hi all!

I want to “master” my modular jams for personal listening. I have dozens of stereo mixes recorded with my Zoom handy recorder. I’m looking for a software that fixes the loudness of my recordings and applies light compression/limiting/EQ and converts the result to MP3.

I have Klevgrand Grand Finale on my iPad and I’m quite happy with the results. But even with a template, it still requires a lot of manual steps and file juggling.

Do you have any recommendations for a free or paid software (iOS, macOS, online)?

Thanks!

[Edit: I’ve put the “mastering” in quotes. I do not want to belittle the art & craft of mastering. I’m just want to convert my jams so that I can listen to them without reaching to the volume control all the time.]

1 Like
#331

IMO, ‘Batch Mastering’ is pretty much an oxymoron. Sure you could process everything with the same algorithm, but will it really do a great job on every track? I think a human is still needed for stellar results. What you refer to is not really mastering, but two buss processing.

If you just want everything to hit the same target loudness so you never have to touch a volume control, then I can highly recommend the Loudness module in RX7, it’ll do what you need. I used to use it to batch process tracks before I made DJ mixes so I wouldn’t have to worry about levels too much. Foobar2K can also do something similar for free, with ReplayGain, but would take a bit of setting up.

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#332

Yes, you are right. I’ve edited the question to make it more clear.

Unfortunately, the loudness module is only included in RX7 Advance for $1200, and Foobar2k is Windows only.

#333

Or try cloudbounce? Online mastering, theres a bit of marketing hype speak about it all but master a track and see if you like it?

#334

Basically “batch mastering” is what broadcasters do to ensure a consistent level and color of their program. (That’s mostly done on the live audio stream but tools exist to do that offline).

ffmpeg apparently includes a loudness normalizer that takes into account the edge case where peaks are too high to apply an upward gain offset without clipping. I’ve never used it but i guess it works.
See http://k.ylo.ph/2016/04/04/loudnorm.html
Put that in a simple shell script to work over an entire folder and voilà.

But this will only fix the problem of level discrepancies between files, not large dynamic changes inside a single file. For that you want some kind of AGC.
Feeding your previously loudness-normalized files into stereotool will provide you AGC, multiband compression, etc. There is a command line version (and for our purpose here, it’s free i think) that you can use in a script too.

edit. looking into it it seems that stereotool does r128 normalization so the ffmpeg two-pass stuff from above can be skipped.

(actually i was planning to set up some kind of automated processing chain at work so i will look into that… in september.)

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#335

Maze Rider is a free iOS app for auto-leveling.

#336

Maybe just grab a good limiter for a decent price and set it so the output is the same per song. Throw a high pass at 30 and a low pass as 20k before the limiter and that should get you where you want if you don’t wanna invest in something like Ozone

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#337

(seconding nomination of ffmpeg as a good fit for this kind of task.)

actually, ffmpeg’s loudnorm filter has an adaptive mode and also a double-pass adaptive mode. with LRA targets this makes it very useful for this purpose.

ffmpeg’s other filters also include dynaudnorm (another implementation of a dynamic normalizer), mcompand (standard multiband soft-knee compander), alimiter (standard lookahead limiter) and others which may be useful. on linux you can also apply LV2 and LADSPA plugins.

https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#Audio-Filters

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#338

The limiters in your DAW, in combination with a Glue or bus-style compressor, will go a long way to helping you with obtaining a coherent inter-track consistency, if you learn to use them well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMJeWXtJODc is a good intro to limiters in general (they all work fundamentally the same, L2 is more mastering oriented in that it’s got output targets and such, but pay more attention to the functional behaviour and the controls than to that aspect of it and you’ll quickly understand how to use tools you already have for this).

Limiting is of course only the final stage, intended to control the overall loudness from track to track to make an album more consistent or to ensure you’re not over-loud when going to streaming formats, but it is an important aspect of the mastering process - since that process is specifically focused on making a piece of music optimal for a given album context and via a given distribution medium.

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#339

Cool. This could be what I need: https://github.com/slhck/ffmpeg-normalize
It also accepts pre and post filters and the list of available ffmpeg filters is long. So it should be easy to apply HPF/LPF as suggested by @brndnwilliams

#340

Any recommendations for a mix/mastering engineer who’s not scared of harsh noise? :smiley:

#341

Me! :wink:

Have worked on loads of noise over the years, and am a big fan.

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#342

Me too :grin: in 20 characters

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#343

(the fine folks above of course :point_up: )

can also recommend tom dimuzio
https://www.gench.com/mastering

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