14 Apr
2007
14 Apr
'07
11:36 p.m.
I wrote and recorded a nice little 7 tracks worth of sterio audio using
Audacity set to CD quality. It all sounded great as a project file,
and the burning of the CD showed no errors, but when I play it
on the sterio it sounds so weak and bland compared to store-bought
music CDs. What can I do to get some life into it?
I know next to nothing about the production side
of audio, so any comments, web sites where I can get information,
or information of any kind would be appreciated.
I have a major restriction with my recording. It's almost all done
directly into the computer without microphones because I have to
keep noise levels low around here. Bass sounds just fine this way,
and even the electric guitar through a Korg box, but forget about
loud guitar amps or PAs or anything like that. I do the vocals and harp
on those rare times when no ones around. But the end result, the
Audacity project file, and the .WAV file I export from it, sounds just
fine. Its the burned CD-R on the sterio that sounds bland compared
with regular music CDs. Something is missing.
14 Apr
14 Apr
11:52 p.m.
On Saturday 14 April 2007 21:35, millward wrote:
times when no ones around. But the end result, the
Audacity
project file, and the .WAV file I export from it, sounds just
fine. Its the burned CD-R on the sterio that sounds bland
compared with regular music CDs. Something is missing.
These are some of my observations based on trial and error... I'm
no engineer, nor an audiophile, just a guy who likes his music
to sound "like a real record".
If you're making something that sounds like almost any kind of
popular music (pop, rock, country, even most jazz and folk)
you're going to want to experiment with compression at the very
least, since that's kinda standard on commercial releases
nowadays and I assume that's what you're comparing to.
Almost every recording nowadays has some reverb on it, even if
only to simulate a room sound (unless it was actually
recorded "live in the studio", in which case it's not
necessary), so if your stuff sounds really dry and flat that'll
probably help. Be subtle about it or you'll sound like you've
recorded "Chant VIII".
Also, if you're recording the bass directly with no amp
simulation or any of that, it'll have no presence at all. You
probably want to dirty it up a little, maybe with an overdrive
or distortion plugin used judiciously.
Rip a music CD that you think sounds great and look at the
waveforms and at the frequency spectrum so you can get an idea
of some things to try with EQ, compression, etc. But don't try
to make yours look just like theirs because you'll end up
overproducing it and instead of sounding bland it'll give us all
ear fatigue.
Rob
15 Apr
15 Apr
9:12 a.m.
Am Sonntag, 15. April 2007 schrieb millward:
I wrote and recorded a nice little 7 tracks worth of
sterio audio using
Audacity set to CD quality. It all sounded great as a project file,
and the burning of the CD showed no errors, but when I play it
on the sterio it sounds so weak and bland compared to store-bought
music CDs. What can I do to get some life into it?
Welcome to the (very important) world of mastering!
In the last days there was some big discussion about compression on this
mailing list. You should read that thread...
You should look at jamin, which is a mastering suite for jack.
I don't know if jamin can be interconnected with audacity, but with ardour I
would propose the following:
1. Import all your songs into one ardour-session.
2. Connect jamin as an insert-effect on the master-track.
3. Work your way through mastering... (takes the longest time)
4. Export the whole session from ardour. This gives you a big wave-file and if
you choose to do so (and added the track-markers) a toc-file ready for
burning your audio to a cd right away.
5. Listen to this cd on as many different system you can get hold of.
6. Repeat steps 3 to 5 as long as you want/need.
7. Sell lots of cds and make lots of money. (Depending on if your cd contains
the next number one hit :-)
Have a nice sunday,
Arnold
--
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2:55 p.m.
Thanks for the tips, Arnold. I'm struggling with mastering myself.
One overall question, then a few more specific.
Genarally: What advantages, if any, does your method have over just
taking a bunch of well mixed songs, throwing them in a single
directory, normalizing them with ecanormalize (or something like it)
and burning that directory to disc as audio? (An aside to this
question: anybody know how to get metadata into wav files?)
I don't know if jamin can be interconnected with
audacity, but with ardour I
would propose the following:
1. Import all your songs into one ardour-session.
Import them all onto the same track/channels, side by side, I assume?
2. Connect jamin as an insert-effect on the
master-track.
3. Work your way through mastering... (takes the longest time)
A little more detail would be helpful here for us newbs -- what are
the basic principles of good mastering? I haven't had any luck with
jamin even though it works well with *very* low latency on my system
-- can't figure out what I'm supposed to do with it.
4. Export the whole session from ardour. This gives
you a big wave-file and if
you choose to do so (and added the track-markers) a toc-file ready for
burning your audio to a cd right away.
Any advantages to a .toc file as opposed to plain old wav or aiff?
7. Sell lots of cds and make lots of money. (Depending
on if your cd contains
the next number one hit :-)
Sounds great. Anybody have any success at doing this without selling
your soul to a record company?
Have a nice sunday,
You too! Thanks again.
Arnold
--
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3:16 p.m.
Am Sonntag, 15. April 2007 schrieb Charles Linart:
Yeah, I mean one stereo track that contains all the songs one after another
with the same breaks as you want them on cd.
For mastering you don't need low-latency and because of the high cpu-usage of
jamin you don't want it...
For more on mastering please search soundonsound or this lists archives as I
am also only a (advanced) beginner in this field.
The toc-file doesn't replace the wave-file, it accompanies it and contains the
information cdrdao needs to burn the cd in disc-at-once mode. That way you
can declare track begin and end where you want and you can even have break
between songs which don't contain silence (good for live recordings where the
comments between songs can be "hidden" in the break).
So long,
Arnold
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Genarally: What advantages, if any, does your method
have over just
taking a bunch of well mixed songs, throwing them in a single
directory, normalizing them with ecanormalize (or something like it)
and burning that directory to disc as audio?
Well, imagine all songs rather high level except one song with a low level in
general and just some high-level-peaks (voice tends to have some high peaks
for rather short time). Normalize would keep that song with low
overall-volume because of that one peak.
Mastering (the compression-part) removes the peak and makes everything a bit
louder.
I don't
know if jamin can be interconnected with audacity, but with
ardour I would propose the following:
1. Import all your songs into one ardour-session.
Import them all onto the same
track/channels, side by side, I assume? 2. Connect
jamin as an insert-effect on the master-track.
3. Work your way through mastering... (takes the longest time)
A little more
detail would be helpful here for us newbs -- what are
the basic principles of good mastering? I haven't had any luck with
jamin even though it works well with *very* low latency on my system
-- can't figure out what I'm supposed to do with it. 4. Export the
whole session from ardour. This gives you a big wave-file
and if you choose to do so (and added the track-markers) a toc-file ready
for burning your audio to a cd right away.
Any advantages to a .toc file as
opposed to plain old wav or aiff? 
4:42 p.m.
On 4/15/07, Arnold Krille <arnold(a)arnoldarts.de> wrote:
For more on mastering please search soundonsound or
this lists archives as I
am also only a (advanced) beginner in this field.
Here's a good introduction by Ron Parker, an audio engineer
who is one of the jamin developers...
http://jamin.sourceforge.net/old/Loudness/loudness.html
--
joq
4:46 p.m.
On 4/15/07, Jack O'Quin <jack.oquin(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 4/15/07, Arnold Krille <arnold(a)arnoldarts.de>
wrote:
Oops, that was an old version, here's the latest...
http://jamin.sourceforge.net/en/loudness.html
--
joq
For more on mastering please search soundonsound
or this lists archives as I
am also only a (advanced) beginner in this field.
Here's a good introduction by Ron Parker, an audio engineer
who is one of the jamin developers...
http://jamin.sourceforge.net/old/Loudness/loudness.html 
3:17 p.m.
On Sun, Apr 15, 2007 at 12:55:10PM -0400, Charles Linart wrote:
Any advantages to a .toc file as opposed to plain old
wav or aiff?
toc = table of contents
It's not a replacement for wav or aiff. It's a text-file describing your
audio-CD - telling your CD-burning-application details about where tracks
start and end (this means you could have several tracks in a single .wav)
and whether there should be pauses between tracks and things like this.
18 Apr
18 Apr
7:29 p.m.
I don't know if jamin can be interconnected with audacity, but with ardour I
would propose the following:
1. Import all your songs into one ardour-session.
2. Connect jamin as an insert-effect on the master-track.
3. Work your way through mastering... (takes the longest time)
I'm not sure if I have a ram problem or if wires crossed somewhere,
but with both Ardour and JAMin working, the sound gets all chopped up
and horrible. CPU load jumps from about 3 percent to about 40 percent
with JAMin running as opposed to without. Everything seems kosher in
the patch bay and with the input/output connections in both Ardour and
JAMin
Patchbay: JAMin outputs to Ardour, Ardour forwards to JAMin
Ardour: Ardour track outs 1 and 2 go to JAMin in L and R
JAMin: outputs back to Ardour's master track
per this tutorial http://jamin.sourceforge.net/en/tutorial.html
All I can think is that I need more ram but there's already a gig and
a half in my box. Is that enough, or am I doing something wrong with
the connections?
7:48 p.m.
Am Mittwoch, 18. April 2007 schrieb Charles Linart:
Use a bigger packet size. For mastering you don't need low-audio-latency.
2x1024 is really good enough and should decrease your problems. CPU-usage
won't go down that much, since Jamin uses a lot of cpu-power...
Arnold
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I don't
know if jamin can be interconnected with audacity, but with
ardour I would propose the following:
1. Import all your songs into one ardour-session.
2. Connect jamin as an insert-effect on the master-track.
3. Work your way through mastering... (takes the longest time)
I'm not sure if
I have a ram problem or if wires crossed somewhere,
but with both Ardour and JAMin working, the sound gets all chopped up
and horrible. CPU load jumps from about 3 percent to about 40 percent
with JAMin running as opposed to without. Everything seems kosher in
the patch bay and with the input/output connections in both Ardour and
JAMin
All I can think is that I need more ram but there's already a gig and
a half in my box. Is that enough, or am I doing something wrong with
the connections?
9:10 p.m.
So set input and output latency to 2 in Jack (from 1 and 0, respectively)?
That didn't work. Even with all the connections off, if JAMin is
running concurrently with Ardour, Ardour barfs. A gig and a half
seems like plenty of memory but maybe not.
Use a bigger packet size. For mastering you don't
need low-audio-latency.
2x1024 is really good enough and should decrease your problems. CPU-usage
won't go down that much, since Jamin uses a lot of cpu-power...
Arnold
--
visit http://www.arnoldarts.de/
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9:20 p.m.
Charles Linart wrote:
So set input and output latency to 2 in Jack (from 1
and 0, respectively)?
That didn't work. Even with all the connections off, if JAMin is
running concurrently with Ardour, Ardour barfs. A gig and a half
seems like plenty of memory but maybe not.
try to bypass all the stages of JAMin.. IIRC that decreases the CPU
load. then re-enable one by one.
9:41 p.m.
The buffer size is already 1024
How do I, "bypass all the stages of JAMin?" I don't even know what
that means. Sorry for my ignorance.
On 4/18/07, Robin Gareus <robin(a)gareus.org> wrote:
Charles Linart wrote:
So set input and output latency to 2 in Jack
(from 1 and 0, respectively)?
That didn't work. Even with all the connections off, if JAMin is
running concurrently with Ardour, Ardour barfs. A gig and a half
seems like plenty of memory but maybe not.
try to bypass all the stages of JAMin.. IIRC that decreases the CPU
load. then re-enable one by one.
_______________________________________________
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9:49 p.m.
Charles Linart wrote:
The buffer size is already 1024
How do I, "bypass all the stages of JAMin?" I don't even know what
that means. Sorry for my ignorance.
different "processing stages" in jamin:
input -> EQ -> compressor -> limiter -> output
the "displayed" spectrum can be selected in the prefs.
click on the checkboxes labled "bypass"
3 of them for each compressor band. and the one for the Limiter are at
the bottom of the screen.
the EQ bypass is just below the EQ-canvas in the middle of the screen.
9:53 p.m.
On 4/18/07, Charles Linart <clinart(a)gmail.com> wrote:
So set input and output latency to 2 in Jack (from 1
and 0, respectively)?
That didn't work. Even with all the connections off, if JAMin is
running concurrently with Ardour, Ardour barfs. A gig and a half
seems like plenty of memory but maybe not.
Should be more than enough... I do this on a machine with only 512
megs of RAM with no problems at all. Is jackd running with realtime
priveleges?
-- Brett
------------------------------------------------------------
"In the rhythm of music a secret is hidden;
If I were to divulge it, it would overturn the world."
-- Jelaleddin Rumi
10:28 p.m.
Should be more than enough... I do this on a machine with only 512
megs of RAM with no problems at all. Is jackd running with realtime
priveleges?
-- Brett
Yes, as a matter of fact. How should it be set?
As long as I'm asking dumb questions (and getting smart answers) how
does one work in JAMin? You play the track from Ardour, it goes into
JAMin... OK, I get the concept of bringing down the peaks to create
headroom, then bumping the whole thing up... but then what?
And if you do it the way it was suggested further upthread, mastering
all songs in one long track, how do you mark the songs so that when
the audio file is played, it shows up as "Song 1 by So and So" in the
player instead of just the name of the exported .wav file? Is that
what the toc is for, and how would one create a toc file... and how
would it be implemented?
One song is (by design) heavily clipped for about the first five
seconds. Won't that mess things up if all the songs are in one long
track?
Thanks again for your help and for your patience with my near-total ignorance.
11:04 p.m.
On 4/18/07, Charles Linart <clinart(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Just checking... it should be using realtime.
Should be more than enough... I do this on a machine with only 512
megs of RAM with no problems at all. Is jackd running with realtime
priveleges?
-- Brett
Yes, as a matter of fact. How should it be set? As long as I'm asking dumb questions (and getting
smart answers) how
does one work in JAMin? You play the track from Ardour, it goes into
JAMin... OK, I get the concept of bringing down the peaks to create
headroom, then bumping the whole thing up... but then what?
Mastering is a rather arcane topic by itself. You might want to
research on the web for specific info on mastering techniques (they
will apply to any software or hardware you use). Here are some:
http://www.digido.com/ (Bob Katz site, one of the masters in the industry)
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/aug04/articles/computermastering.htm
And if you do it the way it was suggested further
upthread, mastering
all songs in one long track, how do you mark the songs so that when
the audio file is played, it shows up as "Song 1 by So and So" in the
player instead of just the name of the exported .wav file? Is that
what the toc is for, and how would one create a toc file... and how
would it be implemented?
Ardour can export a TOC. I usually take the exported WAV (or WAVs) and
use cdrdao + gcdmaster to visually create track markers... from there
you can burn the CD directly. Oh, yeah, use cdrdao for making CDs, it
does 'disk-at-once' burning so you can have tracks with no gap in
between.
One song is (by design) heavily clipped for about the
first five
seconds. Won't that mess things up if all the songs are in one long
track?
If you are using something like Jamin, you will need to create scenes
-- different settings you can call up for different parts of a track.
But you'll need to read the Jamin documentation for that.
-- Brett
------------------------------------------------------------
"In the rhythm of music a secret is hidden;
If I were to divulge it, it would overturn the world."
-- Jelaleddin Rumi
19 Apr
19 Apr
9:59 a.m.
Thanks for the help. Still can't figure out why the sound gets all
mucked up when both programs are running, even completely disconnected
from each other.
It will be interesting to learn how to master, assuming I can figure
out why the sound gets so messed up. Tried everything suggested here
and nothing worked... *sigh*
10:18 a.m.
On Thursday 19 April 2007, Charles Linart wrote:
The problem with jamin is the need to jack it from program to program in order
to use it. A plugin to aurdour would be more efficient. My system cannot run
such a setup either.
I don't
know if jamin can be interconnected with audacity, but with
ardour I would propose the following:
1. Import all your songs into one ardour-session.
2. Connect jamin as an insert-effect on the master-track.
3. Work your way through mastering... (takes the longest time)
I'm not sure if I have a ram problem or if wires crossed somewhere,
but with both Ardour and JAMin working, the sound gets all chopped up
and horrible. CPU load jumps from about 3 percent to about 40 percent
with JAMin running as opposed to without. Everything seems kosher in
the patch bay and with the input/output connections in both Ardour and
JAMin
Patchbay: JAMin outputs to Ardour, Ardour forwards to JAMin
Ardour: Ardour track outs 1 and 2 go to JAMin in L and R
JAMin: outputs back to Ardour's master track
per this tutorial http://jamin.sourceforge.net/en/tutorial.html
All I can think is that I need more ram but there's already a gig and
a half in my box. Is that enough, or am I doing something wrong with
the connections? 
10:30 a.m.
On Thu, 2007-04-19 at 15:18 +0300, David Baron wrote:
On Thursday 19 April 2007, Charles Linart wrote:
The problem with jamin is the need to jack it from program to program in order
to use it. A plugin to aurdour would be more efficient. My system cannot run
such a setup either.
the CPU utilization of JAMin would be scarcely any different as a plugin
than as a standalone process. the overhead of running two JACK clients
is also relatively small (probably on the order of 40usec per interrupt
from the audio interrupt).
when mastering, you can generally reduce CPU load by using larger
latency settings. unlike mixing, where you may need/want the instant
feedback you get with low latency, mastering is a more subtle process
that doesn't necessarily benefit (and may even suffer from) constant
tweaking over short time intervals.
--p
I
don't know if jamin can be interconnected with audacity, but with
ardour I would propose the following:
1. Import all your songs into one ardour-session.
2. Connect jamin as an insert-effect on the master-track.
3. Work your way through mastering... (takes the longest time)
I'm not sure if I have a ram problem or if wires crossed somewhere,
but with both Ardour and JAMin working, the sound gets all chopped up
and horrible. CPU load jumps from about 3 percent to about 40 percent
with JAMin running as opposed to without. Everything seems kosher in
the patch bay and with the input/output connections in both Ardour and
JAMin
Patchbay: JAMin outputs to Ardour, Ardour forwards to JAMin
Ardour: Ardour track outs 1 and 2 go to JAMin in L and R
JAMin: outputs back to Ardour's master track
per this tutorial http://jamin.sourceforge.net/en/tutorial.html
All I can think is that I need more ram but there's already a gig and
a half in my box. Is that enough, or am I doing something wrong with
the connections?
11:56 a.m.
Good news! The transport works with the frames/period set to 4096.
Not sure if/how that will affect the quality of the finished product.
One more stupid question if you don't mind: When I play and fiddle in
Jamin, I hear the sound I want -- loud, full, etc -- the ouput meter
is bouncing around pretty close to 0, but the spectrum shows the top
bars at around -30. The resulting exports from Ardour are just awful
-- volume low *and* tons of clipping. What am I missing?
On 4/19/07, David Baron <d_baron(a)012.net.il> wrote:
On Thursday 19 April 2007, Charles Linart wrote:
The problem with jamin is the need to jack it from program to program in order
to use it. A plugin to aurdour would be more efficient. My system cannot run
such a setup either.
_______________________________________________
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Linux-audio-user(a)lists.linuxaudio.org
http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/linux-audio-user
I
don't know if jamin can be interconnected with audacity, but with
ardour I would propose the following:
1. Import all your songs into one ardour-session.
2. Connect jamin as an insert-effect on the master-track.
3. Work your way through mastering... (takes the longest time)
I'm not sure if I have a ram problem or if wires crossed somewhere,
but with both Ardour and JAMin working, the sound gets all chopped up
and horrible. CPU load jumps from about 3 percent to about 40 percent
with JAMin running as opposed to without. Everything seems kosher in
the patch bay and with the input/output connections in both Ardour and
JAMin
Patchbay: JAMin outputs to Ardour, Ardour forwards to JAMin
Ardour: Ardour track outs 1 and 2 go to JAMin in L and R
JAMin: outputs back to Ardour's master track
per this tutorial http://jamin.sourceforge.net/en/tutorial.html
All I can think is that I need more ram but there's already a gig and
a half in my box. Is that enough, or am I doing something wrong with
the connections?
2:47 p.m.
Hi,
Am Donnerstag, 19. April 2007 schrieb Charles Linart:
Good news! The transport works with the frames/period
set to 4096.
Not sure if/how that will affect the quality of the finished product.
No. Exporting an ardour-session uses freewheeling-mode where it runs as fast
as processor/apps allow and not in realtime...
One more stupid question if you don't mind: When
I play and fiddle in
Jamin, I hear the sound I want -- loud, full, etc -- the ouput meter
is bouncing around pretty close to 0, but the spectrum shows the top
bars at around -30.
Which is allows as the output-meter shows the summed volume of all frequencies
while the spectrum shows individual frequency-bands.
The resulting exports from Ardour are just awful
-- volume low *and* tons of clipping. What am I missing?
Did you actually export the result of jamin?
The should-be setup for mastering is using jamin as an insert on the master
track. And export saves the sound of the master-track... (No need to record
jamins output into another track!)
If that is clipped, you have done something wrong in jamin, but if jamin
doesn't clip, the export should be okay.
Arnold
--
visit http://www.arnoldarts.de/
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22 comments
10 participants
participants (10)
-
Arnold Krille -
Brett W. McCoy -
Charles Linart -
David Baron -
Jack O'Quin -
millward -
Nicolai Lissner -
Paul Davis -
Rob -
Robin Gareus