Ableton Forum

I am sending to a track to a mastering engineer and he wants the track peaking at -3 db, without putting a compressor on the master for obvious reasons. Now since live's master meter doesn't have a db indicator - is there a native plug-in that could tell me the peak of my track?

it does have a dB meter. see the horizontal line above the sends for each track? drag up on that to see the dB meters. then widen a track to read the meter better.

hit ctrl-and any one dB peak readout to clear them all at once, very handy.

Tone Deft wrote:it does have a dB meter. see the horizontal line above the sends for each track? drag up on that to see the dB meters. then widen a track to read the meter better.

hit ctrl-and any one dB peak readout to clear them all at once, very handy.

thanks, but how do you find the highest peak of the track without pressing the peak indicator button every second throughout the track?

stop the song.
click the peak meter to clear it.
start the song.
let it play until the end.
the value the peak reads is the highest the song went.

be patient, watch how it updates.

Tone Deft wrote:stop the song.
click the peak meter to clear it.
start the song.
let it play until the end.
the value the peak reads is the highest the song went.

be patient, watch how it updates.

yup, wow, im retarded, i never saw that feature.

it's a common question and a really cool mastering feature that's kind of hidden. the ctrl-click on the peak meters is a godsend.

hsve fun!

oops.

if you are not happy with the readability of live's meters... even if they are stretched out completely (which i think is sufficient, but whatever)
as tone suggested

sonalksis free G is extremely precise and very good to read, put it on your master and voila...

all other helping tools for extreme precise readings (same quality as the free G or above) i know of are for money and general analysis tools that offer much more... such as bias reveal, for example.

Basically he is telling you to normalise to -3dbFS.

Download the audacity audio editor (its free) - somewhere in there there is some analysis tools that you could use to load up a bounced mix and see the peak level.

Or make sure you have see Live numeric levels (drag the top of the mixer and meters section up until you see them), click on the numberic level for the master track to reset it, then play your track through. At the end it will tell you the highest level. Then adjust the master level up/down by the difference between the indicatted peak level and you desired peak level - ie if it says -5.2, then crank it up by 2.2.

Now if Live's normalize funtion in the export audio/video actually had a means to set the normalisation level - it would be useful for this, as it is... it aint!

Good advice.

However - MOST mastering engineers would be more than happy to have some extra headroom, the ME is probably stating that he needs -3dB as the maximum HOTTEST peak, overwise it's not much worth his trouble, so if the master peak is -5.2dB, that's more headroom to work with and he'd probably be even happier - it's not the mix engineer's job to balance levels uniformly, that's ONE of the functions you pay a mastering engineer for.

BTW, if your mix is hotter, don't just throw a brickwall limiter on it set to -3dB as a quick fix, TURN YOUR LEVELS DOWN !!
Otherwise, you're still hypercompressing, even though you left the max peak at -3dBFS.

Peak RMS is better represented in Soundforge/Wavelab/Peak or even other DAWS such as Cubase/Nuendo, which provide statistical information. Live is getting there slowly. We finally got a proper Limiter (albeit without oversampling ) at L8 along with a multiband compressor. Better metering and audio statistics would help a lot with mastering projects.

As it is, stuff like Sonalksis's Free G, Voxengo SPAN which are gain meters and spectograms are useful. SPAN also displays average and peak RMS values.

I tend to just use Soundforge and be done with it, quick, easy, no messing.

leedsquietman wrote:BTW, if your mix is hotter, don't just throw a brickwall limiter on it set to -3dB as a quick fix, TURN YOUR LEVELS DOWN !!
Otherwise, you're still hypercompressing, even though you left the max peak at -3dBFS.

this can't be stressed enough, always levels down first, before limiting / compressing. (to avoid clipping, too high levels on the master)

live limiter is crap
better to use the compressor and set properly for limiting.
and.... a question

why not to keep the overall level down...even below -10db then render normalized song for mastering. the rendered file can be leveled down by 2 mouse clicks by the value you set... do you loose anything? (24/32 bit) real question. i didnt notice anything.

24 bit gives you plenty of headroom, it wouldn't really matter if your master peak was down below -10dbFS, adding gain in 24/32 bit mode doesn't give you the noisefloor issues it does in 16 bit with it's significantly less headroom. I know people at the cubase forum who advocate having a typical individual TRACK peak as -18db (exception being drums in that they can have so many fast attack transients which you don't want to hack off if you can help it, so -10dB for drums is OK). This is very conservative and you can go louder, but it's just like cooking. You can always add more salt if there isn't enough, but put too much salt in and you've ruined the meal.

has it anyhing to do with my question? (why no to render as normalized?)