#loudness war

[negativeohio]

help our mix is too loud, constantly going to +4db before limiting, and all the vocals are drowned out BUT the kick and snare hits *just* right for that ear-crushing punch without sounding clipped and we don’t wanna turn down anything, what do

[kolega8]

[grey-viridian]

Little good things in big bad times

[gruebelbach]

[:de]Mixes und Masters gefixt 🎛 #Mixing #Mastering #KI [:en]Mixes and masters fixed 🎛 #mixing #mastering #AI [:]

[:de] Vor ein paar Monaten hatte ich schonmal auf remasterte 🍞 BROTESTSONGS hingewiesen. Doch ich hatte mich immer noch etwas getäuscht. Die Arbeit zwischen Musiker und Ton-Mixer zu trennen, ist eigentlich der professionelle Standard – und auch nochmal die Aufteilung zwischen Mixer und Mastering-Ingenieur. Der Ton ist eine eigenwillige Welle, und bis ich mich ab 2016 verstärkt mit Musik-Aufnahme…

[anherosixtynine]

I'm winning I swear

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Flower Empowered.

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[hatedbyiife]

So this is what Paris felt like

[balamist]

to me Obi-Wan and Anakin are like that guy holding another guy on a leash meme except the leash is Anakin's padawan braid

[nibeul]

asuro

[id: it’s a drawing of a human Jedi Knight oc. He has brown skin and dark brown hair which is done in two braids that are wrapped in muted brown cloth. He wears black robes which has its sleeves tied up by a brown tasuki and brown arm guards. On his left arm, the guard is partially covered by lighter brown fabric. He holds his left hand in a fist at his side while the other hand is holding onto his lightsaber. /end id]

[andromeddog]

🫨

[bogleech]

Allegedly the weapon that most rendered knight armor obsolete was the cannon and I don't know if that's true but if it is then there had to have first been a few battles in which some meaningful percentage of knights were getting obliterated by cannonballs and I just wish I'd been there to hear what it sounded like

[thepaisleyarchives]

This post made me a bit emotional, actually; it's the sort of emotion you get when someone you're getting to know suddenly starts talking about experiences you never even thought they had. It was a mix of joy (from knowing you're not alone), sadness (from them having to deal with this), and sometimes, anger (from them having to conform to their surroundings).

I have actually ran Vylet's breakout albums ("CUTIEMARKS" and 'fish whisperer," both measuring at DR6 on the [in]famous Dynamic Range Meter, which isn't really hot potatoes) through a program called Soniformer by Voxengo (a multiband dynamics algorithm with up to 64 BANDS!), using the "Spectral Expander" preset, with a few tweaks. Just to keep peaks from getting too wild, I ran a hard clipper (with no gain or shaping) at the end of the chain. These new masters come in at around DR8 (not bad at all, for more electronic-based rock like Vylet's, at least), which doesn't seem like a massive improvement, but I found the sound to be more "punchy", with higher transient retrieval than the final masters I started with. "fish whisperer" already sounded very good for the situation the master was in, so this processing wasn't strictly necessary for that album (it was mostly preference), but "CUTIEMARKS" in particular was a small revelation in the way the new master sounded.

I eventually did the same to "Carousel" (DR6, but much like her previous effort, sounded great for such a low score), with the same DR8 result, and the same feeling of transient improvement. This might sound like a "failure" to live up to expectations, but all this proves is that Vylet is getting a lot better at using her mastering processes effectively (or, alternatively, she just mixes better nowadays). Whatever it is, I hope she keeps on improving, and even if things might not get quieter, it might still be better anyways. (also, maybe on the album's 5th or 10th anniversary, maybe a "CUTIEMARKS" remix would be a good idea?)

loudness in music.

you may be listening to music that is lesser in quality than artists really intend.

(pictured: a visual guide of FabFilter Pro L2's metering section)

this post is mainly aimed to talk to non-musicians and non-audio engineers, but if you're one of those and also feel for this post, cool. but i want to put this into perspective for people who aren't in music (recording and production in specific). i'm going to attempt to explain a very complicated concept as simply as i can fathom.

there's a lot of stages to the creation of a song or album. there's the writing, recording, production, mixing, and mastering (to simplify). what i'm going to be talking about has to do with "mastering", the final stage a song goes through before it's considered 'final' (in a sense).

mastering, in short, is the process of taking a fully recorded, produced, and mixed song; cleaning it up and preparing it for people to listen to it. a mastering engineer will often add some equalization adjustments to the overall song, adding some compression to bring things together and unify elements, and other stuff like that.

but the duty of establishing the "perceived loudness" is imparted on the mastering engineer.

loudness ≠ amplitude. amplitude is the true measurement of an audio's volume. but "loudness" is a measurement of how loud we actually perceive something. there are technically quiet songs that you perceive as louder than they are, and loud songs that you actually perceive as quiet. this is because loudness ≠ actual technical volume. amplitude is measured in Decibels (db) and perceived loudness is measured in Loudness Units Full Scale (LUFS).

audio processing and transmission always has a limit. for example, if you turn up the volume up too high while listening to music on your headphones, distortion and crackling may occur. this is called "clipping". the threshold for clipping varies from one device to another. cheap earbuds may distort without you even pushing the volume much. other headphones may be really hard to even get audio to clip.

(image source: MTX)

thus, because of the limitations of how audio works — both in the digital and analog domains — the mastering process of music seeks to finalize a song to be loud enough, but not so loud that it clips in a way artists and listeners don't want.

enter: The Loudness War

in the 90's when digital music studios started to become a thing, people started mastering songs louder and louder because things didn't distort as much when you pushed them in digital spaces. you can get stuff to clip in the digital world, yes, but it was much easier to push things louder than on purely analog equipment. ever since then, songs have been getting mastered louder and louder. we've called this "The Loudness War", because people compete to have the loudest mastered songs.

something you must understand is that the louder you try to master a song (without it clipping above a digital threshold) the more squashed the song gets. the methods for mastering a song really loud often make it lose quality and fidelity. for some people this is fine. stuff like dubstep usually benefits from the squash and the distortion (although it's a personal preference). nonetheless, people have actively chosen to master songs loudly to compete with each other, but at the cost of a song's quality and dynamics.

quick side note: a song's dynamic's is a measurement of how quiet the quiet parts are, how loud the loud parts are, and what the ratio is between these are. so a VERY dynamic song will have very quiet parts and very loud parts. a NOT VERY dynamic song will have mostly everything in the same volume range at all times.

so ok. artists and engineers have been fighting in this loudness war. everyone wants to have loudly mastered songs even though the more you try to push a song to be loud the more it will lose fidelity and the more compressed it will become.

below is a video containing three versions of my song "bonnie". the first version is the original master. the second version is being pushed into a mastering limiter hard. and the third version is being pushed into a mastering limiter VERY hard. a mastering limiter is usually the last part of the signal path of a song's master. i've (very roughly) gain matched the examples so that instead of hearing the loudness differences, you will hear the quality differences. they should be roughly the same volume, but the quality differences will be what you hear. pay close attention to the waveforms getting progressively more squashed the more the song is being pushed into the limiter.

keep in mind, this example is extreme and unscientific, only meant to demonstrate the kind of quality deterioration that occurs when you try to push a song to be potentially too loud. these quality issues often exist at least a tiny bit in songs that are mastered to be really loud.

so we know that trying to master something loud comes with tradeoffs. but people still really like to do it and sometimes it can be pulled off just fine. but not every song handles these treatments equally.

but what i really want to get at here is the fact that mastering things super loudly in the modern day is kind of pointless! the main exception i can think of is club mixes, DJ's really like to have loud stuff to work with because of the complications that come with DJing in venues. but aside from that, there kind of isn't a point to mastering that loudly anymore.

streaming services like spotify and youtube follow broadcasting standards and automatically adjust music to be roughly in the same range. this is so people listening to music on these platforms, especially through playlists, won't be bothered by a discrepancy in REALLY LOUD songs and really quiet songs being in the same space.

i've been thinking about all of this for a long time. i've been learning how to master my own music for maybe 4-5 years now? but recently an audio engineering youtuber, white sea studio, came out with this video:

i highly recommend you watch it if you have the time and are interested in learning more on this aspect of music. but to divulge upon the points and information they talk about...

...it's unanimously recommended to master your music to be at least ABOVE -14 LUFS. there are two kinds of misconceptions. the first being that you should try to have your song reach EXACTLY -14 LUFS. wytse explains in the video how this is wrong, and that experts instead recommend you master just to be above -14 LUFS, not exactly and certainly not lower. popular and loud music is being delivered at around -5 and -4 LUFS even. this is really loud and you can imagine there are lots of compromises to quality to get songs to be that loud. but as wytse continues to explain, there's clearly not much point in doing this if streaming services are going to be turning loud songs down anyway.

we're in an age where the loudness war really shouldn't exist. not only has it caused lots of songs (including my own) to be finalized and delivered with compromises to quality and dynamics as well as unfavourable distortion, but it's established this misconception that songs need to be mastered super loudly in the first place.

if it were so simple though, i don't think we'd be talking about this at all. to speak from personal experience, i actually feel self conscious if my music isn't as loud as other songs in the same genre that i'm making. i've found myself not even checking if i'm making it above -14 LUFS, often times i'm just trying to get everything to be as loud as possible. and this is a huge problem for me because i make music in every genre. period. my album CUTIEMARKS mixed dubstep, pop, rock, acoustic, ambient, and so many other genres in one place; but i worked so hard to get everything to be consistently the same loudness. the reality is that it's so hard to pull that off and i'm pretty sure the album is lesser in quality because of it. i already have frustrations listening back to things like "nonexistent meet-cute" and "how to kill a monster" from that album because i tried to push them to close enough loudness to a dubstep song lol.

but despite knowing all of these things very transparently, i still feel very self conscious about it. and i feel like this conversation actually needs to extend beyond musicians and engineers. that's why i'm writing this. i want listeners and fans to know that there's this thing going on and it's been going on for a while and it causes a lot of stress and misconceptions. i'm especially self conscious because i'm actually going to try to actively master my next album quieter than all my other ones on purpose. to try and combat all of this. even if it makes me self conscious to listen to some of my favourite albums of this year and know how much louder they've been mastered compared to mine. but i think it's really important we let songs breathe and not try to compromise quality anymore. it would relieve a lot of stress from me personally to be able to know this is all ok.

if you ended up reading this whole thing, thanks so much. this is a thing that's actually been affecting a lot of musicians who do their own engineering a lot. and it's been affecting all audio engineers anyway. this is an extremely complex topic and to anyone who knows as much as i do about it, trust me i KNOW this post is EXTREMELY simplified. but i want to speak to listeners and fans, not musicians and engineers specifically.

[leafdoodles]

Let’s pretend it’s still May 4th and it was a rebel pilot uniform all along

[laughhardrunfastbekindsblog]

In "Reunion," the squad gets ambushed on the artillery deck of the Venator after they did exactly what Crosshair thought they would do: tapped Imperial comms.

But while Crosshair starts speaking, Tech is already on it and formulating an escape plan.

And Tech already has an idea in mind by the time Crosshair follows up with a mocking "So predictable."

And so the following exchange then occurs:

Tech: Echo, scomp in and reroute reserve power to the cannons.

Echo: If these cannons fire, this whole deck will collapse.

Tech: Exactly.

And I just can't help but imagine Tech (perhaps subconsciously) thinking "Hmm, predict THIS" as the Venator deck comes crashing down on everyone's heads - including the unsuspecting Crosshair who is actually taken by surprise for once.

[frostbitebakery]

“Oh,” he puffs out, chuckling at himself, “I definitely do not know what I’m doing.” The lightsaber slips into his hand as he calls to it. “I’m still standing though.” - Quinlan Vos in LOUD.