[linux-audio-user] Mastering; Rezound, fir filter, digital clipping

[Steve Harris]

On Mon, Jun 16, 2003 at 12:57:09 +0100, Daniel James wrote:
> > you can link jamin to your ardour (or insert name
> > of favourite multitrack editor) session and make individual level
> > changes to source tracks, rather than messing with EQ in the
> > mastering stage. Several of us think this is the Right ThingTM and
> > should be encoruaged.
> 
> I understood (eg, from the interview with Chris Gehringer of Sterling 
> Sound in June 2003 SoS) that mastering engineers didn't actually like 
> working on projects which aren't mixed down. It seems to me that what 
> you're describing is remixing rather than mastering.

Yes, but not everyone feels that way. The cynic in me thinks theres a
reason why mastering engineers insist on working from stereo prints, but
thats another story. As its a jack process you can use it on pre-printed
stereo WAVs too, but it doesn't prevent you from working on multitrack
sources like many mastering systems.

> Surely if you're going to EQ or otherwise filter individual tracks, 
> this should be well out of the way before mastering commences? LADSPA 
> already makes this possible, with a fine collection of plugins. But 
> maybe JAMin is one of those new paradigm things...

Sometimes the act of mastering shows up problems that weren't obvious in
the mixdown stage, normally you have to either EQ away the problem (bad as
it will effect that band in all tracks) or get another print which wastes
time.

> Presumably if the mastering plugins are all LADSPA based they might be 
> available to all LADSPA clients eventually? Looking at Glame 1.0, 
> this could be a particularly suitable platform because it allows you 
> to build LADSPA filter networks in a drag and drop gui, and also 
> offers file analysis on import and various options for normalisation. 

They are not all available, but I will make a version of the missing bits
(mostly multiband compression) after jamin is finsihed.

- Steve