working with sound files and making them LOUDER!

Needs2Know · Post by **Needs2Know** » Wed Jul 13, 2005 12:22 am

Lets say I make a track and record it as loud as possible into whatever program im using. Usually when I burn it to a CD and play it in my car the volume is so low i have to turn up the damn thing all the way up and even then i still want to go louder. I have a mac G4, Cubase SE, Reason 2.5, and the demo version of Live 4.0 lol.

I could try to use cubase to import the track then duplicate it once or twice and drag the duplication directly under the original. I've done this before with shorter sound clips made from Reason and it in fact makes them much lounder. But man there has to be another way. I cound see that being a problem with complicated snyth sounds(not sounding like the original).

There should be a program that you can "amp" or "set" the final sound volume envelope. I think once I tried just moving the volume envelope in my CD architect 2.0 program which made it louder but when i burned a copy or exported the mix the end result was "no change in volume" of the final version.

Maybe there is a way in Live 4.0 or 5.0 to do this.

treysmith · Post by **treysmith** » Wed Jul 13, 2005 12:26 am

You can dither the tracks to make them much louder. The Waves L2 has great dithering but it's fairly expensive. With that plugin I almost always add +6db to my tracks w/o adding any distortian. Google for dither to get more info.

Needs2Know · Post by **Needs2Know** » Wed Jul 13, 2005 12:40 am

would a hardware preamp amp the "dither"?

treysmith · Post by **treysmith** » Wed Jul 13, 2005 1:00 am

Don't think so, but I no absolutely nothing about hardware preamps. Diterhing essentially adds an light amount of inaudible whitenoise to your track to prevent distortion.

DJ VAKIS · Post by **DJ VAKIS** » Wed Jul 13, 2005 7:11 am

Maybe you can use a compressor, with very careful setings you can bring the volume up.

Michael-SW · Post by **Michael-SW** » Wed Jul 13, 2005 8:56 am

You have normalized the wav file before burning it to CD, right? If not, just open the file in any wave editor and do a peak normalize. That will make your sound use the whole dynamic range of the CD format.

The usual tricks to bring up loudness are compression and limiting. How to do that is a very complex subject and there are probably 100s of articles written about it. Use Google or ask someone here who is better at it than me...

jahnlay · Post by **jahnlay** » Wed Jul 13, 2005 9:50 am

As what Michael said, and if you don't know, then don't offer stupid advice. Trey Smith, dithering has to do with rounding word lengths i.e. changing something from 24bit to 16bit. The L2 uses limiting to make things louder and then dithers the wordlength to the correct amount of bits that you need for the format that you want to read it off, got it? Don't go spouting rubbish, if you don't know then leave it to someone who does.

If it's your own tracks that you wanna make louder, then read up on some basic mastering processes or take them to a mastering house.

Michael-SW · Post by **Michael-SW** » Wed Jul 13, 2005 10:59 am

Rereading the intial post I actually get the impression that Need2Know hasn't normalized his track. That should be the first step in trying to increase volume.

But if you have a lot of headroom in your tracks, you aren't mixing them as loud as you can either. Normalizing will bring up the volume anyway, no problem. But you sacrifice dynamic range, ie you are perhaps using only 13 of the 16 bits CD audio gives you.

So, next time you do a mixdown, push up the master volume a bit further. If you push it too far you will get clipping/distortion, but you should be able to see that on the mixer VU meters. Just go down slightly from there and then normalize your track.

stuffe · Post by **stuffe** » Wed Jul 13, 2005 1:07 pm

http://www.propellerheads.se/home/disco ... icle=part3

Check out this really great article on the Props website. Don't worry about it being Reason specific, it isn't, it's just about how to acheive the maximum volume and clarity from your sound files through various methods.

Here's a snippet from the intro:

"If your burning question is "Why doesn't my music sound as loud as my commercial CDs? The peak meter tells me both sources are equally loud!", there are two things you should know: 1) This article will answer your question; in fact, it was written for you. 2) While we will focus on the subject of volume (real and imagined), there's so much more to mastering than just loudness"

It explained a lot to me when I was asking myself the same question as in the initial post.

Cheers,
Dan

treysmith · Post by **treysmith** » Wed Jul 13, 2005 2:37 pm

jahnlay wrote:As what Michael said, and if you don't know, then don't offer stupid advice. Trey Smith, dithering has to do with rounding word lengths i.e. changing something from 24bit to 16bit. The L2 uses limiting to make things louder and then dithers the wordlength to the correct amount of bits that you need for the format that you want to read it off, got it? Don't go spouting rubbish, if you don't know then leave it to someone who does.

If it's your own tracks that you wanna make louder, then read up on some basic mastering processes or take them to a mastering house.

Hey Jahnlay..

First off, your a fucking asshole. Learn to reply w/ some tact.

Anyway, the L2 is a obviously a limiter (hence the name L2) but it uses a dithering process so you can raise db without adding huge amounts of distortion. Hence there "IDR" (Increased Digital Resolution) technology .

http://www.waves.com/content.asp?id=139

I thought dithering would also help keep distortion out of a 16 bit track with a large gain increase, but I could very well be wrong. This isn't recording.org or the soundonsound forums, it's the ableton forums... filled with amateurs who enjoy discussing audio production and technique. Get over your ego.

http://www.mtsu.edu/~dsmitche/rim420/re ... ither.html

thx1138 · Post by **thx1138** » Wed Jul 13, 2005 2:48 pm

PMSL Trey Smith is a Class Producer, dont be a bum!

Marcus

jahnlay · Post by **jahnlay** » Thu Jul 14, 2005 1:56 pm

IT has nothing to do with ego, it has to do with helping people out. If you're not helping you're hurting. Don't take it so personally, I didn't mean that you're an asshole for trying to help, just that you should be careful about helping and what you're saying. It doesn't help anyone if you go about spreading the wrong info, so just be sure before you give advice. We're not all amateurs on the forums, some are professionals who've been working with digital audio for over 12 years and know a lot of the ins and outs. I didn't mean to pull you down personally, so sorry about that, sometimes I get a bit upset that people just spout rubbish that they've heard without knowing from personal experience. Forgive me for being rash but it's better to be truly helpful and tactless than nice and useless, no?

olafmol · Post by **olafmol** » Thu Jul 14, 2005 2:58 pm

treysmith wrote:You can dither the tracks to make them much louder. The Waves L2 has great dithering but it's fairly expensive. With that plugin I almost always add +6db to my tracks w/o adding any distortian. Google for dither to get more info.

as is said in this thread: you're talking about *limiting* ... whatever additional methods the limiter is using isn't really relevant for the question, when you want to make something louder, you can use a limiter, at the cost of dynamics of course...

it's imho more important to make a good mix, with the right sounds at the right volume

good luck! Olaf