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

[Jörn Nettingsmeier]

On 04/12/2016 02:12 PM, jonetsu at teksavvy.com wrote:
> On Tue, 12 Apr 2016 10:58:10 +0200
> Thorsten Wilms <self at thorstenwilms.com> wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> I'd say I have an idea in the ballpark of what it does, as Robin
> explained it here, for one.
>
> So above it says: "making it equivalent to nudging the master gain
> fader."
>
> That's it.  Why would 3 weeks of work on 25 tracks be thrown to a
> mathematical function that will move one fader ?

???

That still sounds like you're confused about it.

If you normalise the master output, it does not affect your mixing 
balance at all. All the mysterious "mathematical function" does is:
1. play the song through a "peak hold" meter.
2. look at the maximum peak level, say it's minus n dB FS.
3. play the song again with the master fader at plus n dB FS
4. save the result

If by "tracks", you actually mean "songs", well then, yes, if you have 
one song per session, normalizing each one individually can upset the 
loudness balance from one song to the next, but I doubt you'd get that 
one perfect anyway. For this kind of workflow, when switching songs 
means loading another session, I would recommend to export each song, 
then create a new ardour session with as many stereo tracks as your 
album has songs, arrange the songs one after another, but each on an 
individual track. Then you can fine-tune the relative levels with the 
channel faders and even throw in some extra "mastering" processing like 
EQ if the songs don't quite match yet.

All best,


Jörn



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Jörn Nettingsmeier
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