[LAU] Music made with linux: Abundance - Ambient-Psy-Trance

[fons at kokkinizita.net]

On Tue, Nov 09, 2010 at 07:52:30PM -0800, Patrick Shirkey wrote:

> I think this version proves that the exporter in ardour3 is not adding any
> distortion,

Nobody ever claimed it did, AFAICS.

> my sound cards are not broken

It doesnt prove anything of the sort. Exporting doesn't depend on your
sound card. It just goes through the entire mix in freewheel mode and
writes the result to a soundfile.

To verify you soundcard the only way is to measure it.

> and that spending some quality
> time on the levels is a worthwhile exercise.

This is certainly true, but I fail to see what's your problem here.
If you want to raise the average to peak ratio use a fast lookahead
limiter. This will also allow you to be it bit more relaxed during
mixing as any small overloads will be taken care of automatically.
If you want the maximum technical level (which is an entirely different
issue) in the output, avoid clipping and normalise the result. 

AFAICS, the only problem with the export-then-normalise procedure in
Ardour is that normalising after export to 16-bit with dithering will
remove most of the benefits of dithering. It's probably irrelevant
given the type of music you produce. 

Ciao,

-- 
FA

There are three of them, and Alleline.