Subject:Mastering a piece

Posted by: flwolf

Date:9/25/2001 4:53:18 PM

When it's all done and a musical piece is ready to be put on a CD, I miss a certain indicator in SF 5 that tells me how the all over volume/peek is. Too much, or not enough? How do I know...?

Is there a way to do this type of control in SF 5, and I just haven't seen it yet?

Subject:RE: Mastering a piece

Reply by: beetlefan

Date:9/26/2001 2:37:56 AM

That's just it. You can't know. There are certainly tools in SF that will help you by the numbers AND help you to achieve volume. Run a statistic over the file to get a reading of the RMS, which is the indicator of your overall volume avarage. You could use a guideline like a commercial CD of the type of music you are mastering for a guide of how loud things should be.

To get your files at a uniform volume, use the Normalization feature. Here, you can adjust your files by either peak or RMS. Then you go to WaveHammer for that overall volume boost. WaveHammer is a good mastering tool and I prefer it over at least Cool Edit's Hard Limit.

Subject:RE: Mastering a piece

Reply by: jgalt

Date:9/26/2001 4:38:00 AM

Click on Process/Normalize. As beatlefan says, you can pick or set various volume maximums in here. If this file is to be burned to a CD, I would recommend Max Peak Value. This will set the loudest peak in the file to 0 Db. If the file is to be converted to another format, try -1 Db from max peaks.

Subject:RE: Mastering a piece

Reply by: beetlefan

Date:9/26/2001 10:07:11 AM

But if you want all of your songs to be uniform in sound use RMS normalization. You can pick an arbitrary amount and RMS normalize all your files to that value, or pick one file as your standard and RMS normalize to that. You shounl use to have SF compress if the peaks exceed 100%. If your files are in 32-bit float, you mau not have to worry about it, and you can choose "ignore". You can deal with the peaks later. But if you choose compression be prepared to have your files slightly compressed if you choose this method. If you have a value of about -16db or more you may have less chance of compression. You can still use WaveHammer to boost the volume a bit.

Subject:RE: Mastering a piece

Reply by: Rednroll

Date:9/26/2001 9:09:48 PM

Practice....Practice...Practice...and then compare your mastered piece to a Nationally released CD. There's many ways and tricks to master a song for CD. I would not recommend the methods previously mentioned.

Subject:RE: Mastering a piece

Reply by: rraud

Date:9/27/2001 3:20:59 PM

This may sound dumb, but, do have the meters turned on? If not, Go to "View" - "Play meters". These will tell you how much head room you have or how much you are over. You can right click the meter to set the resolution also,which is neat and helpful.
Then follow some of the other posted sugestions.

Subject:RE: Mastering a piece

Reply by: beetlefan

Date:9/27/2001 5:16:34 PM

I realize, after reading my post again (I was in class listening to a lecture while I wrote it) my response was not clear.

Rednroll, there are all kinds of ways and tools to use fro mastering. There is no right or wrong answer.

The bottom line really should be, USE YOUR EARS!