Ableton Forum

do any of you have a certain way of making sure you're audio isn't peaking?

i'm very new to all of this stuff and am trying to figure out the best way i can go about making sure all of my sounds are not peaking.



please help, thanks!

I vote yes.

polls don't always mean yes or no. i'm gathering what all of you guys are using for this 'problem'
literal nancy.

name calling is not a virtue.

Simple, avoid any audio. Under no circumstances put anything on any track.

...on a serious note, are you talking about clipping?

Well, how do you avoid falling from a cliff?
The answer is simple: stop walking towards the edge.

Likewise, just lower the volumes of your samples and devices. Pretty obvious, right?

jeez, if you want to get all serious and shit...

drag up on the bar above the faders to expand that area. then you'll see little buttons that display the peak for each track. hold ctrl and click on one of them to clear them all.

it's perfectly fine to drive tracks well over 0dB, you can go a little over +6-dB.

NEVER EVER EVER go over 0dB on the Master, shoot for -3dB or thereabouts.

you can use limiters and compressors and all that but if you can mix without them your mixes will sound better (that might vary depending on the style of music you make, some genres call for massive amounts of compression.)

Tone Deft wrote:it's perfectly fine to drive tracks well over 0dB, you can go a little over +6-dB.

I've been under the impression that Live uses floating-point for internal audio. If that's true, you can overdrive individual tracks as much as you like; it's just that doing so renders the level meters pretty useless.

an Abe chimed in saying that the limit was 62dB or something like that, maybe 64dB.

Live does use floating point but that doesn't mean infinite headroom.

the tradeoff is when your tracks are all in the red and you have to pull the Master fader down, which gets harder and harder to work with as it's less flexible.

Tone Deft wrote:Live does use floating point but that doesn't mean infinite headroom.

True. However, the standard 32-bit floating-point format allows values with a magnitude as large as 10^38 and as small as 10^-38 (approximately), and each factor of 10 is approximately 10 dB; so my back-of-envelope computation suggests a dynamic range of literally hundreds of dB. Of course the noise floor is defined by the 24-bit fraction, but that's still 144dB dynamic range.

Tone Deft wrote: the tradeoff is when your tracks are all in the red and you have to pull the Master fader down, which gets harder and harder to work with as it's less flexible.

Agreed. Moreover, with the tracks in the red, it's hard to see what the actual levels are.

I'm just dealing with the abstract question of how far it is possible to overdrive individual channels.

[email protected] wrote:do any of you have a certain way of making sure you're audio isn't peaking?

I always make sure my audio is peaking.. ROCK N ROLL BABY!!!

ark- you're arguing with the messenger. here's nico's word on it. I don't doubt you're wrong but there's more to building DAWs than us users know about. I don't know why it's -60dB, it's probably an arbitrary limit set as a trade off for some other part of the system. no clue.

http://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php? ... 9#p1123739

Tone Deft wrote:ark- you're arguing with the messenger. here's nico's word on it. I don't doubt you're wrong but there's more to building DAWs than us users know about. I don't know why it's -60dB, it's probably an arbitrary limit set as a trade off for some other part of the system. no clue.

Yup, that's what Nico said: There's an arbitrary limit of +60 dB.

I was reasoning from the nature of floating-point arithmetic, which I happen to know something about (having once written an exact simulation of IEEE 32-bit floating-point arithmetic as part of a software test suite).

ark - cool. yes, many of us have real world experience with floating point audio and math. it pays the bills.