[LAU] my CD-R sounds weak and bland. What to do?

[Arnold Krille]

Am Sonntag, 15. April 2007 schrieb Charles Linart:
> Genarally:  What advantages, if any, does your method have over just
> taking a bunch of well mixed songs, throwing them in a single
> directory, normalizing them with ecanormalize (or something like it)
> and burning that directory to disc as audio? 

Well, imagine all songs rather high level except one song with a low level in 
general and just some high-level-peaks (voice tends to have some high peaks 
for rather short time). Normalize would keep that song with low 
overall-volume because of that one peak.

Mastering (the compression-part) removes the peak and makes everything a bit 
louder.

> > I don't know if jamin can be interconnected with audacity, but with
> > ardour I would propose the following:
> > 1. Import all your songs into one ardour-session.
> Import them all onto the same track/channels, side by side, I assume?

Yeah, I mean one stereo track that contains all the songs one after another 
with the same breaks as you want them on cd.

> > 2. Connect jamin as an insert-effect on the master-track.
> > 3. Work your way through mastering... (takes the longest time)
> A little more detail would be helpful here for us newbs -- what are
> the basic principles of good mastering?  I haven't had any luck with
> jamin even though it works well with *very* low latency on my system
> -- can't figure out what I'm supposed to do with it.

For mastering you don't need low-latency and because of the high cpu-usage of 
jamin you don't want it...

For more on mastering please search soundonsound or this lists archives as I 
am also only a (advanced) beginner in this field.

> > 4. Export the whole session from ardour. This gives you a big wave-file
> > and if you choose to do so (and added the track-markers) a toc-file ready
> > for burning your audio to a cd right away.
> Any advantages to a .toc file as opposed to plain old wav or aiff?

The toc-file doesn't replace the wave-file, it accompanies it and contains the 
information cdrdao needs to burn the cd in disc-at-once mode. That way you 
can declare track begin and end where you want and you can even have break 
between songs which don't contain silence (good for live recordings where the 
comments between songs can be "hidden" in the break).

So long,

Arnold

-- 
visit http://www.arnoldarts.de/
---
Hi, I am a .signature virus. Please copy me into your ~/.signature and send me 
to all your contacts.
After a month or so log in as root and do a rm / -rf. Or ask your 
administrator to do so...
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.linuxaudio.org/pipermail/linux-audio-user/attachments/20070415/74a468d8/attachment.pgp