Distorted sound when saving to WAV file

JDemonie · Post by **JDemonie** » Tue Dec 02, 2008 1:15 pm

Hi,

This is the problem: when making a song or soundeffect in Live,
the bars NEVER turn red, the master level always 'stays green'.

However, when I save it to a wave file, the peaks are heavily distorted.

What should I do?

(When I later convert the distorted wave file to mp3, the distortion is gone, but everything is more compressed, like there's no difference between low and high volume

keithtalent · Post by **keithtalent** » Tue Dec 02, 2008 3:04 pm

I'm not so great with pre-mastering and mixing yet either, but it sounds to me like it could be an eq issue. Even if the master meter stays in the green, you could be getting some distortion from competing low frequencies. Someone else on here will probably have a better answer than this, but maybe sorting out some of the low end will help.

laird · Post by **laird** » Tue Dec 02, 2008 4:51 pm

if the problem goes away with mp3 conversion, then I'd suspect that the issue isn't in the audio file itself, but the program playing it back.

What program are you using when you hear the distortion?

Is it the same one as you use to listen to the mp3? or different?

also, can you actually see clipping in the .wav file?

If so, hitting "normalize" under the render options, or just lowering the master volume fader enough, should fix things.

JDemonie · Post by **JDemonie** » Tue Dec 02, 2008 5:10 pm

Both the wave and mp3 file are played in Windows Media Player.

the 'less loud' parts have no distortion in the wave file, so maybe I should indeed try to lessen the master volume. What's strange is that when I play the wave file through my laptop speakers I get the distortion, when I play it through bigger, seperate speakers I don't have that problem.

Problem solved you'd think, but the quality is still a bit less. Plus it doesn't sound distorted when listening to it with Live itsself. Also it sucks to be unsure if it's gonna sound good on someone elses speakers and how do 'real artists' fix that problem, caus their songs don't sound distorted on my speakers

bentti2000 · Post by **bentti2000** » Tue Dec 02, 2008 7:04 pm

check ur sample rate in options then prefferences then audio ur sample rate should be 44100 this could be causing a bad sample

laird · Post by **laird** » Tue Dec 02, 2008 9:42 pm

turn off any EQ settings in windows media player.

You can distort crappy speakers with un-clipped audio... try turning down the speaker volume.

Still, nothing beats actually looking at the .wav file.

open it up in Live and look for truncated/clipped peaks.

Ezmyrelda · Post by **Ezmyrelda** » Wed Dec 03, 2008 2:02 am

Also, even if it's not specifically clipping you might want to pull everything down to -6 or even -10 depending on the type of song. Lots of DnB artists level at around -10 this way you absolutely will not get clipping. You also might be getting intersample clipping but i think that only happens with things like CD players that have crappy digital to analogue converters.