mdlbear | Murder, mastering, and mayhem (Reply)

From this post by eleccham comes a link to this article in The Times titled "Why music really is getting louder". Basically it's about the current practice of mastering music so damned loud that it clips.

The article has a few inaccuracies: for example, it confuses the kind of dynamic range compression done at mastering time with the kind of data compression done by codecs like MP3. But the fact remains, a lot of popular music these days is compressed to within a fraction of an inch of its life, destroying any dynamic range it might originally have had.

Fortunately, I don't listen to that kind of music, nor do I intend to subject my listeners to it. I do a minimum of compression on my CD tracks, and I do it by hand in Audacity using the Envelope tool. That lets me bring down the notes where I whack a chord too hard, or the verses where I lean to close to the mic, or the spots where I pop a "P", without affecting the overall dynamic range of the music.

Not that I have a whole lot of dynamic range when I'm singing. The main challenge in the final phases of the mixing will be making sure that the songs where it's just me and the guitar don't have me sounding louder than the ones where I have backup. That will require overriding the standard normalization parameters for just those songs during the build, so as not to maximize their volume.

I've also decided not to throw money at Oasis to have my CD professionally mastered. Maybe next time, if I can find an engineer I can trust who's local and who has done folk music before. For the moment I think I can do fairly well in Audacity, which also gives me the opportunity to correct my problems at the track level before they get mixed down.