Poor quality WAV export

[Alano Tekashi]

So here's my problem.
I got my track produced, eq'ed, mixed and mastered in Ableton. And within Ableton, it sounds great and the sounds are clear and fresh. But when I export it, the quality is shit. The exported wave file just loses all its dynamics and sounds totally different from what I hear in Ableton itself. It's so frustrating and I don't know what to do about it! Anyone have the same problem and what do you do about it?

What's the trick to solve this problem? Please help!

[Angstrom]

What db is the main output peaking at in Live?
What does the peak meter say, is it red?

[3phase]

And within Ableton, it sounds great and the sounds are clear and fresh.

really? how do you manage that?

[Alano Tekashi]

What db is the main output peaking at in Live?
What does the peak meter say, is it red?

Nope, even without the mastering chain on it, there's no clipping. On the mastering chain are an EQ, compressor and a limiter. So it's not in the red. After the export it doesn't sound like it's clipping either, it's just muddy and it misses dynamics in the high and the low end. It's very weird and hard to describe

[Alano Tekashi]

And within Ableton, it sounds great and the sounds are clear and fresh.

really? how do you manage that?

lol, well lots of eq'ing on every channel gives a satisfactory result on the master. I'm sure there are lots of examples which sound far better and fresher than the result I manage to reach

[Tarekith]

Are you listening to the rendered file in Live? Do you have warping on for that rendered master? If so, turn it off.

[Alano Tekashi]

Are you listening to the rendered file in Live? Do you have warping on for that rendered master? If so, turn it off.

No I'm listening to the rendered file in any random audio player such as quicktime, itunes, winamp you name it. I don't import the rendered file again in Ableton to master it. The mastering is on the original track with the arrangements etc.

[hoffman2k]

Are you listening to the rendered file in Live? Do you have warping on for that rendered master? If so, turn it off.

No I'm listening to the rendered file in any random audio player such as quicktime, itunes, winamp you name it. I don't import the rendered file again in Ableton to master it. The mastering is on the original track with the arrangements etc.

For iTunes, there is an explanation why it sounds different. Turn off the "Sound Enhancer" in itunes preferences.
Quicktime should play it normally though.

Try the following: Resample a fragment of your track in Live. Then compare the results to determine if rendering is the problem.

[kev herb]

try exporting the tune with no dither (leave it 32 bit) then listen to the wav. does it still sound shit? if it now sounds ok you can blame lives dither which is a bit shit anyway therefore you may need to dither down to 16bit in another program like sound forge or equivelent OR get a limiter with its own dither like the Fab Filter limiter or Ozone4.

if the above is not the case then just make sure all your track levels are in the green peaking at about -6db and do the same with the level meters of all the devises in your chain for all your channels. remember with digital mixing yellow is the new red!

Failing all that... FUCK KNOWS

[Alano Tekashi]

ok it's definitely not the first option cause I always export without dithering, but I'm really gonna try the second one, see if anything is clipping (I thought not, but I'm gonna check it). I'll also try exporting it without any mastering chain at say -3 or 6dB and then master (crank it up) in a standalone audio editor. Thanks for the suggestions

[nopattern]

its probably your gain staging. i used to have this issue all the time and it drove me nuts and even to tears a few times

make sure all of you individual gain stages per channel are using enough of the (enormous!) resolution and that each signal has a nice healthy RMS level.

i believe the reason for the renders sounding different is that the sound you hear out of live is still in the floating point mix bus, so its possible that even very weakly gain staged signals in the mixer will still sound ok in real time... however rendering such things, depending on the amount of resolution used per channel and the amount of fader attenuation, you can be shaving loads of dynamic range of each channel before it gets to the mix bus, you wont hear it as much in the program because of floating point summing bus

in all fairness the meters are very very misleading, they claim to meter RMS levels but try making the meters look uniform across channels and then put something like voxengo elephant on each channel and see the actual RMS value, i have experienced up to 10db of difference between signals even though the visual meters would tell you everything was equally gain staged...

[ARDJ]

what is your limiter set to? -0.1? Most normal audio players have a very hard time w/ anything higher than that, what limiter are you using? does it have a built in dither? I've had issues in the past using a 24bit dither on a limiter and rendering in 32bit. try and keep everything consistent

[drewbixcube]

One thing you could try, instead of exporting from the file menu, is recording the master output back into live. Then locate the recorded file and have a listen to that. If it still sounds different, I'm stumped. Hopefully it's something simple. The only time I ever had a problem with the export differing from the mix is when I accidentally had convert to mono selected in the preferences.

[mr.ergonomics]

it really easy to test. just record the master via resampling. then take the rendered one and do a phase test...and you should use the same bit depth of course.