Re: [linux-audio-user] Distortion -- bad speakers or cheap soundcard?

Hi Mark, You've asked some good questions. One would think that perhaps software should indeed look at the results and at least warn you that you are exceeding some value, such as the maximum loudness. I haven't used Timidity++ in a long time, so I can't remember whether this program does or not. You should look at the messages or the interface and see if it's warning you. Some software will even tell you how much you've exceeded the maximum and where. Even my very rudimentary software does at least warn me. Generally, you are allowed to set the levels whereever you want, though, even if it does exceed the maximum. Isn't that just peachy? Those of us who are technical like it that way. We just love banging our heads against walls, especially those made of brick or concrete. I believe that Timidity has a gain switch, and this is where you could fix the problem. I usually fix the levels of MIDI files at the MIDI editing stage, rather than in the rendering stage because most of the time I do hardware recording, not software rendering. This would mean either adjusting the master gain or adjusting the gains of all tracks (channels). This latter method allows you to render it anywhere, and I believe most people would advise this as a practice. On your comment about commercial CD's: The people who produce those things are using a lot of tricks to make them very (very) loud without distortion that you can hear, but many would argue that the sound actually is distorted, me included. A lot of the values in those CD's are very close to the maximum, but never went over. If you go over the maximum, then that value is either set to the maximum, or it is changed to another value that is even worse. Either way, it sounds pretty bad, even worse than the "distortion" that many argue is audible on a lot of recent commercial CD's. So what you will probably find is that after adjusting your volumes by some method, your own recording won't be anywhere near as loud as the commercial CD's. You can either worry about it or not, but fixing that is a big headache. You would be in competition with some real pros. I hope this helps. Regards, Dave.