Ableton Forum

Hello all,

First a little introduction : I'm a DJ that mixes CD's (that are sold in store) and I also have my own radioshow on a local radiostation here in Belgium. At the moment I use Ozone 5 for mastering all my mixes. I only use the maximizer to pump up the silent parts of the tracks a little bit.

But Ableton's volume metering doesn't look to good to me... When I import a dance track and play it, it looks like it is always hard limited to 0db (the bar is green, but it goes all the way up), but sometimes you hear that the track sounds WAY louder then another track that is also at 0db... RMS that is called right?

Now I want to even things up before I apply my Ozone maximizer, so I guess I need a good volume meter plugin (or something similar) to analyze the loudness of each track? Any recommendations?

Would love to hear your opinions!

Kind regards,

Raf Theunis

sonalksis freeG is a very nice one. and as the name says, it`s free.......

I'm willing to bet Ozone, and not the metering is the problem here.


You take a mastered track.. from a cd. pop it through ozone. ANd then broadcast the mix? But if your radio station, is like any other radio station, your mix is getting pumped and limited at broadcast as well. The tracks are totally crushed to bits I bet.

You should try a gentle limiter. Event Horizon from Stillwell audio comes to mind. Or even something like PSP Xenon..

But Ozone, Maximus, anything, "we gonna win the loudness war," is a step too far for tracks already mastered.

That said, the Sonalkis meter is great...

Linear Phase wrote:I'm willing to bet Ozone, and not the metering is the problem here.


You take a mastered track.. from a cd. pop it through ozone. ANd then broadcast the mix? But if your radio station, is like any other radio station, your mix is getting pumped and limited at broadcast as well. The tracks are totally crushed to bits I bet.

You should try a gentle limiter. Event Horizon from Stillwell audio comes to mind. Or even something like PSP Xenon..

But Ozone, Maximus, anything, "we gonna win the loudness war," is a step too far for tracks already mastered.

That said, the Sonalkis meter is great...

Thanks for the reply I'm trying to make sure that only the silent parts of my tracks are a little bit louder. To make sure that the louder parts aren't too loud, I turn ozone off and on again to hear if there is any difference.

That said, I'll have a look at the limiters you said there Sounds very interesting and I'm always willing to learn!

Kind regards,

Raf Theunis

BTW, does anyone have experience with Universal Audio Home Precision Limiter Plug-In?

raftheunis87 wrote:BTW, does anyone have experience with Universal Audio Home Precision Limiter Plug-In?

This thing? http://www.uaudio.com/store/mastering/p ... miter.html

Its bad ass. probably a lot less destructive than ozone

cheers

Linear Phase wrote:

raftheunis87 wrote:BTW, does anyone have experience with Universal Audio Home Precision Limiter Plug-In?

This thing? http://www.uaudio.com/store/mastering/p ... miter.html

Its bad ass. probably a lot less destructive than ozone

cheers

Maybe I should give that one a go and see how it works out for me A lot of positive reactions all over the internet.

Damn, you need a UAD-2 DSP Accelerator Card to use that plugin?

raftheunis87 wrote:BTW, does anyone have experience with Universal Audio Home Precision Limiter Plug-In?

I have it, like it a lot and it's my main limiter on the masterbus.
The mode button is nice, this sometimes gives a subtle difference. But sometimes I don't notice the difference that much. It's not a magical button or anything
I never set the release to auto though, I should experiment with it some more in that setting. I like the metering as well.

raftheunis87 wrote:Damn, you need a UAD-2 DSP Accelerator Card to use that plugin?

Yes, you will need the hardware card which performs all the DSP calculations so you have less CPU consumption (and it serves as a 'dongle' as well. No card, no go). I was thinking about selling an UAD-2 Solo when I obtain it from the UAD-1 trade-in program. My UAD-1 is collecting dust anyway, but I already have a Solo and a Duo card. So if you're interested let me know how much your willing to pay for it, I was thinking somewhere in the range of €250.

Opz wrote:

raftheunis87 wrote:BTW, does anyone have experience with Universal Audio Home Precision Limiter Plug-In?

I have it, like it a lot and it's my main limiter on the masterbus.
The mode button is very nice, this sometimes gives a subtle difference. But sometimes I don't notice the difference that much. It's not a magical button or anything
I never set the release to auto though, I should experiment with it some more in that setting. I like the metering as well.

raftheunis87 wrote:Damn, you need a UAD-2 DSP Accelerator Card to use that plugin?

Yes, you will need the hardware card which performs all the DSP calculations so you have less CPU consumption (and it serves as a 'dongle' as well. No card, no go). I was thinking about selling an UAD-2 Solo when I obtain it from the UAD-1 trade-in program. My UAD-1 is collecting dust anyway, but I already have a Solo and a Duo card. So if you're interested let me know how much your willing to pay for it, I was thinking somewhere in the range of €250.

Thanks for the info and I'll keep that in mind.

I think I'm going to give Stillwell Event Horizon and Voxengo Elephant a go this evening

RMS is perceived loudness, as opposed to Peak which is too fast for the ears.

I also like the Sonalksis FreeG... Slightly off topic, but I find X-ISM is handy to check for inter sample peaks.

justin wrote:RMS is perceived loudness, as opposed to Peak which is too fast for the ears.

I also like the Sonalksis FreeG... Slightly off topic, but I find X-ISM is handy to check for inter sample peaks.

I've bought the Slate Digital FG-X plugin a while ago and I read the manual completely. Is it right that a RMS-value of -10dB is "perfect"?

This might help you some for leveling DJ mixes, at least prepping them so you don't need to use a limiter later:

http://tarekith.com/assets/pdfs/DigitalAudioLevels.pdf

Precision Limiter is pretty good, I used to use that awhile back for mastering. Nice smooth sound, cool interface too. That said, I think there's mroe flexible and better sounding limiters out these days, namely Fabfilter Pro-L and Voxengo Elephant 3. Both can be much cleaner sounding than Pre-Limiter, and be pushed harder without distorting if you need. IMVHO.

raftheunis87 wrote:Is it right that a RMS-value of -10dB is "perfect"?

Well it might be perfect for one style of music, but not for another... A Rock / EDM song is likely to have a much louder RMS than say a classical / acoustic. I really only use it as a comparative benchmark so i can see how much dynamics i have lost through mix bus processing... YMMV

I'm currently working this way:

I make my mix and use freeG to make sure that my volumes don't go into the red zone

After that, I put a Event Horizon on my master channel and put a freeG after that. I play with the treshold and look at the volumes in freeG. When everything stays under the peak value (I try to get as close to -0.2 dB as possible), it's ok for me

Is this a good way of doing things?

Kind regards,

Raf Theunis