Ableton Forum

This thread went way off track but the initial couple of pages really helped me to figure a few things out in Live. I did a writeup about this issue hear so that other people can benefit from this:

http://www.syncretia.com/Ableton/Clipping.html

Old topic but why not drive the master a bit into red as long as your limiting at 0. Sounds fine to me isnt distorting

no offense, but maybe you have a problem with your ears?

Syncretia wrote:This thread went way off track but the initial couple of pages really helped me to figure a few things out in Live. I did a writeup about this issue hear so that other people can benefit from this:

http://www.syncretia.com/Ableton/Clipping.html

would really love to see the pix in there!

Emperor12 wrote:Old topic but why not drive the master a bit into red as long as your limiting at 0. Sounds fine to me isnt distorting

you'll probably hear the clipping after you mix down all the tracks and export.

Fanu wrote:

Syncretia wrote:This thread went way off track but the initial couple of pages really helped me to figure a few things out in Live. I did a writeup about this issue hear so that other people can benefit from this:

http://www.syncretia.com/Ableton/Clipping.html

would really love to see the pix in there!

Cool blog post

I would never recommend allowing the master channel level to go over 0dbfs, but interestingly a couple of posters on a recent thread said that it seems if you select Normalise when rendering, Live will adjust the overall level so that even if the master level goes over 0dbfs the rendered output doesn't clip.

Now, I'm just reporting what they said. Maybe it does two passes, the first to determine the maximum level, I don't know. Kind of cool I suppose, but even then there might be side effects in lost resolution, and of course for pre-mastering renders you wouldn't want the output normalised anyway.

Well if you normalize, Live with do what it needs to to bring the highest peak to 0db. No one ever uses normalize haha....As for people boosting channel fader to +5db or whatever....what is the point if you only have to lower the master to -5 to compensate? seems stupid......There is no point because in the end your song will not be louder. Yes you can peak your master above 0 db as long as you are limiting it at 0 db. Thats the whole point of a limiter...

Well, the point is that's not quite the usually expected behaviour of a normalising operation. Even in the manual it just says the file will be "amplified", nothing about attenuation.

If that's true I wonder if some of the people who claim to have no problem when rendering tracks that go well over 0dbfs are using Normalise.

And yes, of course if you limit the master at 0dbfs it won't go over that level and clip. Actually for 16bit masters it's a good idea to limit a little below that.

I have made it a habit of putting my audio card volume really loud, so loud in fact I have all volume in the software on the computer set to 50-80%. When I'm making music in Live this makes me actually mix the track with great punch, while in reality it's much lower in volume than other tracks. Instead of trying to push everything to the max directly in the output file, try to create the distortion and effect at a lower volume, that way it'll sound a lot nicer when people play it at a loud volume. I wish everyone listened to music this way, it sounds much better when it's loud as hell from the amp and output gear and not in the source file

And what if the amp cant go any higher? You should produce your music AS IF the dj will always have the channel faders all the way up with 0 gain and not touching the master volume.....the dj doesn't want to be screwing with the master fader just because your track was not produced as well as the other tracks in his set...producing the track is the producers job not the dj's.