Why do my exported recordings sound like burning garbage?

[buj818]

Projects within Live sound great during playback, but as soon as the project is exported, the wav and mp3 files sound like the gain was turned up to max all across the board. Everything sounds distorted and hollow. I/O sample rate is at 48000, bit depth of 16. Again, sounds great during regular playback inside Live 10, but sounds atrocious once rendered. Please help. Thanks.

[Angstrom]

try this-
go get this plugin:
https://youlean.co/youlean-loudness-meter/

It's a loudness meter. It shows if you are crushing the fuck out of your mix. It won;t affect anything it just shows you what's happening.

Live is very tolerant of smashed mixes, because it's a combo of 32bit and 64 bit floating point where signals are mixed. However rendered files are not so tolerant and will expose any shorcomings or signal overloads.

Put that plugin as the last thing in the chain on your master channel (in Live) and then play back the song (in Live) . Aim to get your mix to never make little red boxes at the top and aim for it to say -16 LUFS integrated on the side.

This may help.

[buj818]

Thanks man. Much appreciated. The mix volumes were the first suspect while shooting the issue, so I cut all mix volumes directly in half from their current positions, and tried to re-render it all, but it was the same result. Sounded smooth as silk in Live, sounded like death metals death metal when rendered. Ill give that plug in a go and see whats up. Thanks again.

[Angstrom]

Hmm, that seems quite odd.
You might have a problem elsewhere in your system. Hard to diagnose but it might be something like: ... whatever app is playing back your wave files might be doing a bad job of turning the rendered samplerate into the native rate of your sound device. Thats a total guess but I'd certainly try playing the wave on different devices.
Also: Try rendering out a simple sine tone playing ascending descending octaves and compare the output wave to what you hear in the app. And look at the wave in an editor for obvious glitches, gaps, flat peaks etc. Id expect it to look very clean.
The way which you describe it sounds like theres some sort of issue in the replaying of the exported sample.
Guessing !

[buj818]

OK, so heres what I got now. Much less distortion (lowered the Master mix level). Better than before, HOWEVER, now the volume tends to randomly fade up and down in both mp3 and wav rendered projects. This is really frustrating. Why the hell cant it just render how it sounds in the program? Literally, Im a rookie with all this, but when Im laying down multiple tracks and it sounds amazing to only find out that the rendered project sounds like hammered dogshit, it makes me look at this as a waste of time. I burnt it to CD and played it on a stereo as well as 2 different vehicles and it just sounds awful. Embarrassingly awful.

[Tarekith]

Do you have any effects on the master channel, maybe a compressor or a limiter?

[Mark Williams]

My guess is that somewhere in the chain, you have a hot signal going thru a plugin somehwere, when you have a chain of plugins it only takes one plugin to receive a hot signal, and that can ruin an audio signal once rendered. Things is they dont show this on the mixer, so it looks like your levels are good, but check the complete chain.
This is a great plugin, & dirt cheap too
https://www.hornetplugins.com/plugins/h ... meter-mk3/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDm3Jew32MA

[Stromkraft]

OK, so heres what I got now. Much less distortion (lowered the Master mix level). Better than before, HOWEVER, now the volume tends to randomly fade up and down in both mp3 and wav rendered projects. This is really frustrating. Why the hell cant it just render how it sounds in the program? Literally, Im a rookie with all this, but when Im laying down multiple tracks and it sounds amazing to only find out that the rendered project sounds like hammered dogshit, it makes me look at this as a waste of time. I burnt it to CD and played it on a stereo as well as 2 different vehicles and it just sounds awful. Embarrassingly awful.

What you're experiencing is totally abnormal.

Could you make a copy of your project by using "save a copy" outside any existing project folder? Then turn off all plug-ins and devices except instruments and do another export. If that sounds good then you can reintroduce half of them again and do another export. If that sounds good, then disable these again and enable the other half. If bad sound return then focus on that half and disable half the of the active devices/plug-ins in this fashion until you find the culprits. Then adjust the settings of these.

I also wonder if your monitor actually gets it source audio from the master?

Feel free to share screen dumps of your tracks with I/O showing and the audio channel settings of your audio interface as well as your export dialog settings.

[EnjoyRC]

Between listening to your mix real time in Live verses listening to a bounced down mix can be drastically different based on the Export settings.
Do you have "Normalize" checked?
What dithering are you using?
What are the other settings in your Export Audio/Video dialog?

[Stromkraft]

Between listening to your mix real time in Live verses listening to a bounced down mix can be drastically different based on the Export settings.

While that can be true, it's not unreasonable to expect an export to null if re-imported.

I never export the Master as I commonly have headphone plug-ins and monitor EQs there that should not be part of the export. Instead I use a "Main Buss" and set the export to come from there. As I usually take great care to get the proper level already in the "Main Buss" I'd never use "Normalize" unless I have a very specific reason. It's sad you can't set the max value of Normalization in Live either.

Do you have "Normalize" checked?
What dithering are you using?
What are the other settings in your Export Audio/Video dialog?

Those are indeed pertinent questions to answer in situations like this one.

[EnjoyRC]

While that can be true, it's not unreasonable to expect an export to null if re-imported.

Completely agree. Key words = "Can be..."

[buj818]

Wow.. Thank you all for your replies. I'ma be honest and say I only understand some of the advice so far (hence my rookie status), but I'm looking into and trying to learn all the terminology you all are throwing at me. My project is simple. Guitar played through Line 6 POD Farm 2 plugin (used for 3 different audio tracks), Steve Slate Drums 4 Plat plugin (2 separate midi tracks), and Ample Bass guitar vst on a single track using Abletons "bass follower" as an audio effect. That's it . All one scene, no master, reverb, or delay tracks/effects. Render settings, 48000hz ds'd to 41100 hz, 16 bit, dither at triangular, normalize is off. No video settings as I only have live 10 intro. Thanks again to all trying to get me straight. I'm still in process of breaking down your replies.

[Mark Williams]

Wow.. Thank you all for your replies. I'ma be honest and say I only understand some of the advice so far (hence my rookie status), but I'm looking into and trying to learn all the terminology you all are throwing at me. My project is simple. Guitar played through Line 6 POD Farm 2 plugin (used for 3 different audio tracks), Steve Slate Drums 4 Plat plugin (2 separate midi tracks), and Ample Bass guitar vst on a single track using Abletons "bass follower" as an audio effect. That's it . All one scene, no master, reverb, or delay tracks/effects. Render settings, 48000hz ds'd to 41100 hz, 16 bit, dither at triangular, normalize is off. No video settings as I only have live 10 intro. Thanks again to all trying to get me straight. I'm still in process of breaking down your replies.

Get you gain staging correct throughout your whole setup is crucial from the start, hence the plugin and video I posted earlier. Especially considering how cheap the Hornet plugin is, it will help enormously.
just in case you missed first time.
https://www.hornetplugins.com/plugins/h ... meter-mk3/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDm3Jew32MA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24fVMTSxbvw&t=2s
This video is super useful https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSzjGdBgPEE

[Angstrom]

I'm not sure that gain staging is the issue here as he's hearing the project play back OK, the render should sound exactly the same as the playback.
gain staging issues would be equally evident on playback, and in both cases Live is very lenient.

[buj818]

I'm not sure that gain staging is the issue here as he's hearing the project play back OK, the render should sound exactly the same as the playback.
gain staging issues would be equally evident on playback, and in both cases Live is very lenient.

I was thinking this earlier, and it's good to hear someone actually say the render should sound the same as play back. I've adjusted and rendered this at least 40 times using different render settings as well as adjusted track levels with no acceptable results. Not only that, the fluctuating volume levels in the rendered project is blowing my mind as well. Could it possibly be a faulted Live 10 download issue? I didn't have this problem in 9.