volume for CDs

[calaf5]

Lets say I have 10+ tracks of music for a classical CD. What is the best way to normalize all the audio so that the volumes are all audilbe on a CD but without losing the difference between the forte sections and the piano sections?

Maybe I can put it this way...
I have a really loud track of brass and another softer track with just the legato samples. When I normalize them the loud track cannot get much louder but the softer track gets much much louder...now it sound odd when listening to them one after another on a CD.

Am I making sense?

calaf

[Nick Batzdorf]

My opinions (and probably others' too): the first thing is that it's a good idea to get the levels somewhat close to where you want them when you're mixing. That doesn't necessarily mean you should be thinking about mastering while you're mixing, but you don't want to have to make, say, a 15dB adjustments to the overall level very often. Maybe 5dB is more like it.

Normalizing raises the level of the entire thing relative to the highest peak. That means one stray transient can determine the level for the whole piece of music - not a great idea, because it gives you absolutely no control over what happens. That's the problem you're encountering: you don't want the lower-level music to come up too high. Normalizing is great for samples, but it's a terrible way to master music.

It's much better to use a peak limiter (Waves L2 is great) so you don't have to worry so much about going over, set the level where you want it to be for a loud track (or section of a track), and then adjust everything else relative to that by ear. You still have to be reasonable with the limiter - I don't like to use more than 2-3dB of L2 very often - and the L2 is very transparent as limiters go - but this way you're the one making the aesthetic judgements about where the levels should be.

[calaf5]

I understand what normalizing is I just needed a way around my problem. I'll look into the WavesL2...what do you think about me just using a track envelope with Sonar?

calaf

[Nick Batzdorf]

Sorry if that was baby talk to you. [:)]

I'm afraid I don't know what the track envelope is. Volume automation? You can do the same thing a limiter does that way. It just takes a lot longer, of course.

By the way, I only mentioned the L1 and L2, and I assume the L3 is also very good, because bad peak limiters are really awful. There are certainly other good peak limiteres on the market.

[PolarBear]

Do I understand it right that you just want to have the loudest track as reference for the others but the difference should stay the same? If that's the case, combine them all into one file, normalize or use a limiter on the whole track, and split up things again into the different tracks. That assumes you got the volumes right already for each track individually before you bounce the thing together.

PolarBear

[calaf5]

@PolarBear said:

Do I understand it right that you just want to have the loudest track as reference for the others but the difference should stay the same? If that's the case, combine them all into one file, normalize or use a limiter on the whole track, and split up things again into the different tracks. That assumes you got the volumes right already for each track individually before you bounce the thing together.

PolarBear

I've thought of that actually but it still sounds too quiet when put on a CD ...you have to turn the volume up more than you would on say a classical CD purchased in the store. I'm not sure how to go beyond the loudest peak?

calaf

[PolarBear]

I'd use a limiter like Nick suggested for that. Or look where the big peak is and look how much different it is from the next peaks in an audio editing software, sometimes one peak is hindering you too much, you could take that down on its own a bit before mixing all down. If you compress the file(s) you'll loose dynamics.

[calaf5]

thanks guys - I'll look into a limiter...

calaf