[LAU] metering, mixing levels was Re: Ardour: exporting woes

[Thorsten Wilms]

On 12.04.2016 02:37, jonetsu at teksavvy.com wrote:
> It is not obvious that
> after so much time spent on a piece adjusting sometimes up to 25
> tracks, that all is thrown to a mathematical function that will
> modify levels.  So I use 'non-norm' now and wonder why normalization is
> a default in Ardour/Mixbus.

This sounds like you still haven't understood what normalization does. 
Given one session of one piece of music, normalization doesn't modify 
"levels", it modifies one level, making it equivalent to nudging the 
master gain fader.

Aside of the shortcoming that Ardour's current normalization on export 
does not take inter-sample peaks into account, the whole issue is one of 
relative loudness between several pieces in one playlist, on an album, 
broadcast on one channel, streamed as one of many on an online service 
... as well as having the headroom to say, make an explosion louder than 
a kick drum.

Ardour's default happened in times of the loudness war, under the 
assumption that at least for Pop/Rock/Dance productions, there was no 
question the peaks of a production would be very even and should hit 
full scale. Now I know better, Robin and Paul know even much better and 
work is under way to make Ardour's export facilities support modern 
standards.

Now if only broadcasters and streamers could agree on a single reference 
level for music ...