[LAU] Ardour: exporting woes

[S D]

Disclaimer: I'm no expert at this by any means! However--

One of the problems frequently encountered with normalizing the audio to a
peak level of 0 dBfs (judging from the number of questions about this
subject on the Internet) is that it offers no headroom for transcoding into
other formats (such as from WAV to MP3).

Many people have experienced this problem when uploading peak-normalized
WAV or FLAC files to SoundCloud, for example, because when SoundCloud's
servers transcode the file to lo-fi MP3 for streaming purposes, distortion,
dropouts, artifacts become common, annoying and sometimes extreme. To
prevent this, SoundCloud (and other music-hosting sites) often recommend
that audio files have their volumes normalized to at most -1 or -2 dB below
peak (below 0 dB), so that the files can be encoded/transcoded safely with
waveform headroom to spare and without those artifacts and problems.

In Ardour, I personally always normalize each track individually to -2 or
-2.5 dB for mixing or saving purposes, but defeat normalization (specify
that it not be used) during export of the audio mix (master output) or
export of any individual tracks using Export--> Stem Export.
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