Ableton Forum

i love live but i noticed that WHEN I RENDER my dj set to my hd it sounds very...well digital and weak/flaky/dull....what can i do to make it sound better

should i put a limiter in the master and not normalizhe song...
compression maybe if so at what settings...please help...i need to burn my demo tonight for review in my DJ class....

the easiest thing you can do is to render to disk & then master the set in an audio editor like soundforge .

What´s the gain on your master fader, if you have turned it down to avoid clipping on the master, so the signal (overall gain) was perhaps to low, then normalize makes it louder, but you lost dynamics then.
I always use a limiter on the master, brickwalled and followed by a dominion plugin to add some "analoge warmth".
What stuff do you have mixed? low bitrate mp3´s mangled with the wrong warp settings can sound very bad too.

Greetings

I actually first render my set with no effects on the master out, carefully adjusting the master fader to get maximum levels but NO clipping. I render to disk in Live, but do not use normalize. I then drop the resulting rendered wav file back into Live, and visually examine the waveform to make sure the peaks are damn close to clipping but definitely not. Sometimes I'll go back and adjust the master fader accordingly and re-render the track. Then, when the waveform is right, I'll open a new live set with one track, put the waveform on this track, and put a Waves L2 (or some sort of limiter) on the master track,and adjust to taste. Sometimes I'll add an eq4, and some people love adding "warmers" to give an "analog" sound like PSP vintage warmer, but I haven't had much luck with that. usually just L2 for me. This process works for me. I like the concept of not mixing with effects on the master, getting it to sound as good as I can, rendering that, then adding the limiter and whatever to the master to get that rendered stereo file pumped up to radio level volumes. Otherwise, it would seem you would need to put the effects on the master from the get-go, and always be mixing through these. I guess you could get your mix happening with no master effects, then slapping some on, adjusting,and rendering, but seperating it into two steps works well for me.

Ryan