[LAU] Tips for mastering?

[Fons Adriaensen]

On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 02:42:04PM +0100, Gabbe Nord wrote:

> * I want a similar soundlevel throughout the whole of the EP, eg. I want
> the songs to be similar in strength even if they are dissimilar in
> dynamics/type of song. Some songs are naturally more "aggressive" and thus
> will be a bit stronger, but I want the climaxes in the more easy going
> songs to be as strong.

Two tools could help you with this, both available on
<http://kokkinizita.linuxaudio.org/linuxaudio/downloads>,
and used to measure your master output.

Jkmeter displays both the RMS and peak level. RMS is closely
related to loudness. The '0dB' on the RMS scale can be either
20 or 14 dB below full scale, which one you'd use depends on
the type of music and mixing style.

Ebumeter measures loudness using the EBU R-128 algorithm. This
basically means filtering and then RMS. It can also measure the 
overall loudness of a complete song (it has 'start' and 'stop'
buttons), as well as the loudness range. The reference level in
R-128 is quite low (compared to mainstream mastering practices),
but you could adjust all songs to the same but higher level.

If you want to know more on how this works, read the LAC2011
paper. 


Ciao,

-- 
FA

Vor uns liegt ein weites Tal, die Sonne scheint - ein Glitzerstrahl.