calx Posted December 8, 2014 Share Posted December 8, 2014 Hi all, not sure if this is the correct forum - feel free to move if needed. I'm looking for some software to help me master some mixes I've done. Now when I say master (not sure if I'm using the correct term) I mean just adjust the levels, not the eq's just minor volume adjustments. Can the good folk of watmm advise the simplest (maybe even free!) software to use? They're stored as wav files and are no longer than 80 minutes. I used toast with jam some years ago which was useful, but I'm thinking times have changed, I'm using a windows 8 computer. Thanks for reading and for any help in advance Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Grain Bastard Posted December 8, 2014 Share Posted December 8, 2014 Audacity is a free audio editor that will allow you to tweak wave files. Its free :- http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
calx Posted December 8, 2014 Author Share Posted December 8, 2014 Audacity is a free audio editor that will allow you to tweak wave files. Its free :- http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ Superb! Thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MisterE Posted December 8, 2014 Share Posted December 8, 2014 you'd probably wanna use a limiter to prevent clipping of the loudest peaks. if you adjust one track by bringing it up a couple of db so it will sound as loud as another track, in doing that, the loudest peaks of the track may go over 0db and if you're working in anything less than 32bit float, those peaks will get clipped off. so basically you'd want a limiter with the threshold/ceiling set at like -0.2dbfs so nothing goes above that, when you make your level adjustments to match the tracks to each other. you'd also wanna pay attention to how much limiting compression you get in louder parts and you'd probably wanna try not to have too many dbs of it ever (the limiter should have a meter that tells you how much compression is happening), like if you ever have over 2dbs of compression then you should really pay attention to the sound so it isn't getting ruined. the release control is the other control to consider, but this stuff is something you should research on your own if you dont already know much about it. if you arent trying to get a super loud mastered result and are only using limiting to prevent peaks from clipping, it's really not as dangerous or hard to do as long as you're careful. limiting has a bad rep but its because of the widespread 'abuse' of it. some people even seem to confuse heavily limited things with clipping. but limiting prevents clipping, even when abused. it still sounds terrible then but it still prevented clipping. limiters limit level from exceeding a point you define and nothing can go past it, so nothing can clip. if used lightly it's a GOOD THING because it allows you to raise one track by a db or two to match another, squash a few peaks that went a bit louder than everything else down, preventing them from clipping, and without changing the sound too noticeably. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mcbpete Posted December 8, 2014 Share Posted December 8, 2014 I personally recommend Reaper ( http://www.reaper.fm/) - free (though with a nag screen) but a very respectable $60 if you want to buy it. I've used it to mix / master all my stuff for years, and it comes bundled with a whole load of plugins out of the box for use in your mixdowns. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MisterE Posted December 8, 2014 Share Posted December 8, 2014 yeh i'd second mcbpete's recommendation of reaper. it's pretty cheap considering that it's comparable to something like cubase, and much more customizable. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
calx Posted December 8, 2014 Author Share Posted December 8, 2014 Cheers peeps :) Mister E, but what happens when I WANT TO go over the limiter, really distort the sound. I understand what you're saying and I know from memory where I need my eq's and levels, it's just sometimes I don't quite find that finite volume I'm looking for. I don't think most people notice it but I know it's there and it'll but the hell outta me! I've put together a 10 series set of different genres (it's just something I've wanted to do for a while) and I'm strictly doing them live. It's just getting a bit annoying when I've done a mix and the last track is slightly off, just adjusting that eq post mix would give it a much cleaner, sleeke finish. Although I understand the use for a limiter, sometimes I want to completely mash the sound up using delays, doubling tracks up, to really test speakers and make people go ah ok, what's this lol Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MisterE Posted December 8, 2014 Share Posted December 8, 2014 well, letting clipping happen does cause distortion, but its a really nasty digital hard clipping that doesn't sound good like something like an overdrive pedal or even a waveshaper distortion plug-in. if you actually want some kind of uniform distortion across your whole track i think it'd be a lot better to just use some kind of distortion effect. if you want really loud volume, that's where abusing the limiter (along with maybe using a compressor before the limiter) comes into play. that's a whole big can of worms and there is already a mountain of discussion about this out there. just search stuff like 'loudness wars' or how to make my mixes loud with a limiter... i'd recommend not going down that particular path tho. recently i just compiled an album of old tracks i did like 10yrs ago, and back then i squashed the shit out of them with limiters, not knowing what i was doing. listening to that stuff, i really regretted the limiting but liked the material. so i spent a couple months doing various things to try to un-do the extreme limiting with varying success. if you wanna go down that path, i would suggest keeping backups of your tracks from BEFORE you limited them. just tuck those unlimited mixes somewhere as backups so that if you change your mind down the road you can go to the source before the limiting, because unsquashing tracks is a bitch. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MisterE Posted December 8, 2014 Share Posted December 8, 2014 i guess im a little unsure what you're doing here. are you basically djing tracks produced by others or is it a mix of your own stuff? if its just for a live thing i guess you could experiment all you want and try to find what you think sounds amazing or whatever it is you're looking for. in some live venue the sound will be different than at home so different rules apply and i dont really know much about that. but if you're talking about mastering tracks you did, as i said in my last post, i think you should def keep backups from before you do anything too extreme to a track Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
calx Posted December 8, 2014 Author Share Posted December 8, 2014 That really is excellent advice MisterE, big thanks! And a new avenue for me to research, even if I don't go down that route like you suggested, it's good to have a better understanding of it. Thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
calx Posted December 8, 2014 Author Share Posted December 8, 2014 i guess im a little unsure what you're doing here. are you basically djing tracks produced by others or is it a mix of your own stuff? if its just for a live thing i guess you could experiment all you want and try to find what you think sounds amazing or whatever it is you're looking for. in some live venue the sound will be different than at home so different rules apply and i dont really know much about that. but if you're talking about mastering tracks you did, as i said in my last post, i think you should def keep backups from before you do anything too extreme to a track Tracks by others, it's mixes I never got round to doing as I was out dj'ing most nights, I've pulled together my favourite genres and tracks from that era to be put out as a series. And it's been so much fun doing it I have to add lol! The mixes are written but I'm a perfectionist and mixing them live (as apposed to compiling them in a programme) is what's posing it's own problem - although like I said, the levels issue is only minor. But I can apply all of that advice in some form or another After these sets I want to get into producing so it's all part of the learning curve :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
brian trageskin Posted December 8, 2014 Share Posted December 8, 2014 proof that you don't want too much limiting/compression: this grooves a hell of a lot more than the album version Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lucas Posted December 9, 2014 Share Posted December 9, 2014 concerning the terminology : composing / recording : that's where you chose your sounds, make them do lush things together, record some stuff, tweak your sounds more and eventually come up with a track which has a beginning and an end. mixing : that's where you tweak your sounds even more with things like EQ, compression, reverb, actually everything you want to use to improve the sound of a tune (working on its subtracks separately and also as groups of tracks). in electronic music (and especially the kind of one we love here) mixing is generally a big part of the composition and it's hard to draw a limit between those two aspects. mastering : working on the stereo master of a mix (of a tune for which the mixing is completed) and operating some further tweaks (generally also using things like EQ and compression) so that it sound even more balanced. Generally this is used in the context of an album n order to add consistency between the tracks. IMO nobody should think about a serious mastering when you want to upload a track on soundcloud or something. don't want to look rigid and I'm sure some other people have other conceptions concerning those terms but those definitions are pretty generic and I though it would help to communicate on this forum to relate to more or less fixed definitions. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
klore Posted January 3, 2015 Share Posted January 3, 2015 "if you think your mix needs a mastering it means the mix is not perfect" not sure where i've seen this but it's so true, to me a mastering is just a compression and making your tune comparable with other standards but a good final sound is 90% the mix 10% the mastering and your mix is best if you do it while producing, not after the tune is done, but it's also a case by case some really good SE tips i've learn : -never mix with headphones -make your mix on two different systems, one supposed to be really big and one crappy (never forget that a great sound system make everything sounding great and will mistake you if your tune isn't well balanced) -mix first with a super low volume, like you can barely hear the whole tune, if you can't hear one sound, it means you must rise/change/remove it - if you hear well your highs you have too much of them because the mastering always raise them up -in general the mastering tend to squeeze kicks and snare, so don't compress them too much on the mix there are lot of other stuff but this is what come first in mind the last rule, the mastering never arrange any sound, it damages more then we think, so if something in your mix is disturbing you and you hope the mastering will fix, you're wrong, mastering will put all your problems and mistakes upfront Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lucas Posted January 3, 2015 Share Posted January 3, 2015 -never mix with headphones -make your mix on two different systems, one supposed to be really big and one crappy (never forget that a great sound system make everything sounding great and will mistake you if your tune isn't well balanced) -mix first with a super low volume, like you can barely hear the whole tune, if you can't hear one sound, it means you must rise/change/remove it - if you hear well your highs you have too much of them because the mastering always raise them up -in general the mastering tend to squeeze kicks and snare, so don't compress them too much on the mix I have to disagree with most of these points, I understand what you mean with some of them but some things need to be clarified. the firsts two points make no sense together : true that it's recommended to hear your mixes on several systems (two or more), and for that reason using some headphones can always bring you more perspective (always depends on which model you use but headphones tend to give you another perception of space : left-right (pan) and front-back (depth, amount of reverb)). Given those differences, you always get surprised when listening to something you made with headphones on speakers, and as recorded music is traditionally made to be listened to on speakers it's more common to use them as a reference. imo it's important to have a main monitor pair which you are confident with, unless you have a lot of experience with mixing in different rooms and with different pairs of monitors. the thing with listening at a low volume might be a good idea just to know how it sounds in that case but it shouldn't determine how you mix your stuff too much : a consistent volume is the most optimal one to listen to music so this volume should be the reference more than another. Actually most professional mixing engineers calibrate their studio so that they always mix at the same level (still for that matter of relating to a reference). regarding mastering : in the end the aim of this task is to work on the stereo master of a tune to make it sound even "better", but not necessarily with the aim of relating to some arbitrary broadcast standards. Actually one could argue you shouldn't care about that. you might just want to apply some subtle changes on it which you couldn't make with just working on the mix (i.e with independent tracks or group of tracks). I heard some mastering engineers really see this work as a full creative process. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
klore Posted January 4, 2015 Share Posted January 4, 2015 well that was basics, of course we can argue hours about each points, but still, it depends on what a mastering means nowadays, if you refer on this mastering we made in the 70s where studio had 40 pairs of monitors and spent days comparing the sound on them, you're right, but for almost every musicians today, a mastering is just making the tune louder and close to the radio/broadcast standards, it's unfortunate but true, the real meaning of what is a mastering is utopia and slowly disappearing, I seen a conference lately in NIce about sound mastering and the two guys haven't mentioned more then 5 or 6 hardware machines in two hours, everything was about plugins and mixing and Waves obviously, Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Perezvon Posted January 4, 2015 Share Posted January 4, 2015 I only "master" my tracks with subtle distortion, compression and limiting and I honestly feel fine enough doing so for now. There's still a serious gap between me and professional producers/engineers but their equipment and skills are such that it's not even fair to compare mine with theirs. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
klore Posted January 4, 2015 Share Posted January 4, 2015 if you guys want some nerdy stuff, check Tony Maserati on Youtube, he's the holy grail of modern pop mixing https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=tony+maserati+mixing he's done lot of videos, they are pretty interesting Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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