Tarekith's Guide to Digital Audio Levels and Metering

[j hubez]

ah great thanks a lot!

[bwax]

Just wanted to say thanks for your work on these. I read the old versions. Excellent.

[H20nly]

*bookmark*

[Tarekith]

Just wanted to say thanks for your work on these. I read the old versions. Excellent.

Thanks for the ummm....thanks!

[sowhoso]

All my guides are here now, including that one:

http://innerportalstudio.com/guides/

can you not fix the link in the OP?

[Stromkraft]

All my guides are here now, including that one:

http://innerportalstudio.com/guides/

can you not fix the link in the OP?

It is indeed fixed.

[Stromkraft]

because i think that its the right range where its not going to clip, actually my main goal is just to set all the volumes at the same level, here are the steps that i've done so far:

if you think that there is something wrong with my method please let me know so i can fix it, im just a noob and have been doing this for about a week now so i think asking for help here is the other option that i have, mp3gain doesn't do the job and while searching for other solutions i found your guide very helpful =)

I also RMS at -18dB as a starting point, however many sounds can be louder still or more quiet and still fill up the mix. My snares seldom need to go over -24dB RMS on the track, as is true for hi hats. This varies of course.

Don't worry so much about different peak levels. Different instruments have different natural levels and transients (peaks) are your friend for leading the ear to your sounds.

I encourage you to investigate multi-stage compression for controlling your sound. That is light compression on the track, on a buss track and optionally on the master and possibly on returns too (Parallel compression). To me this have opened up creative use of compression as a sound tool.

But don't look too much at the meters, listen after what actually sounds good. I did look a lot in the beginning to be able to distinguish nuances, but at some point that is not something you need to focus on.

Make experiments for yourself. It's great fun and you learn.

[Stromkraft]

This is version 2 of my leveling guide, basically a complete rewrite:

http://innerportalstudio.com/articles/D ... Levels.pdf

Great! Thanks!

[pinkpaint]

wow what an amazing read. Thank you so much!

[ikeaboy]

Good stuff in that article and well written too. I wasn't aware the '88.2khz sounds better converted to 44.1khz than 96khz' thing was a myth. Also I'm covering this subject at the moment in classes and 1bit equals 6db of dynamic range is so clear and simple I'm amazed I never read it that way before. I'll be sending a digital pint your way later.

[Tarekith]

Cheers for the pint!