[linux-audio-user] Re: Mastering without mastering - Linux-audio-user

30 Apr 2006

Bruce wrote:

...
  I was just watching the talk on Protege at zkm 2006
and a bit of a crazy
 idea occured to me. In addition to storing qualities of each instrument
 like
 lead, string, percussive etc, a spectral profile could be generated for
 each
 instrument and stored in the database. Then, you could take each channel
 of
 your recording and pipe them (individually) into an app which would
 analyse
 their spectral content, and then suggest alternative patches to make the
 'whole' sound like some idealised mix (there would be a selection of
 these,
 based on Genre perhaps). It would be like a magic button which would make
 a
 track sound immediately better.

 Any thoughts ? 
Just three.  I'm not being snippy, just providing the canonical response.

1:  This isn't an original idea.  It rears it's ugly head every so often.
2:  There is no practical way to define the parameters that determine
    what an "ideal" mix would be.
3:  Even if you could, you wouldn't want to.  Any endeavour that can
    be completely reduced to a deterministic algorithm is no longer art.

The study of *how* to define ideal might be instructive for fleshing out
your own ideas of what sounds good, but you don't want to eliminate the
possibility of other options.  In fact, there are so many, that it's
impossible to define.  (Though imprecise guidelines are a possibility.)

If I had to wish for a magic button, I'd ask it to do something that I
*wasn't* able to do -- like Whirled Peas or such. ;)

Good luck with that!
Phil M

-- 
Dept. of Mathematics, 342 Machray Hall
U. of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada R3T 2N2
Office:  446 Machray Hall, 204-474-6470
http://www.rephil.org/   phil at rephil dot org