Recording - October 2016 - 66

7

(from user testimony) several of these have problems integrating with real-world
DAWs, or are attached to sites which may be infected with malware.
One program that works and seems safe, however, is available as a free download from Orban (maker of hardware dynamics processors for radio). It comes in
versions for modern editions of Windows or Mac operating systems, and it's at
www.orban.com/meter. There's even a special version for Win-XP holdouts like me.
There is also some modestly-priced software from Propellerhead which looks useful
(though I haven't tried it); that's at tinyurl.com/propheadvu. And more and more
companies are including really reliable metering as part of their software, or as
metering packages on their own (e.g. Metric Halo SpectraFoo and iZotope Insight).
Workflows
Mastering the clip that goes with this series of articles wasn't particularly complex. After
topping and tailing the track, I set my VU meters so that, when I fed them my standard
tone (400 Hz, -14 dBFS, generated by Audition), the needles read 0 vu. Then I adjusted
the clip's level in the DAW so the meters read 0 vu on the loud passages. Simple.
Mastering the Bob Bovee album I mentioned earlier wasn't so easy. I didn't have
to determine a song order, because Bob wanted to keep the sequence from the original LP. However, I did have to top and tail each track, and for some of them Bob
wanted me to fade down the instruments' "ring-out" at the end of each track a little
early; the original engineer had left these full length, and Bob felt they were a little
long and slowed down the album's pace. I agreed. I did the fadeouts in the DAW
by marking where I thought they should end (using seat-of-the-pants judgment), then
highlighting back a few seconds and doing the fade-down; at the end of the fade I
tacked on the standard 2.666 sec. of blank audio.
Then it was time to play with levels. I've mentioned that a a VU meter correlates pretty
closely with what a listener hears. "Pretty closely", however, isn't good enough for mastering. What I did was to set the levels of every track the first time around using the VU
meters; after that, however, I used my ears. I chose the vocal sections of the first track,
"California Zephyr", as my "index track" (see Figure 6); I opened the index track in one
instance of Audition, then opened the other tracks one by one in a second instance, and
did A/B comparisons between them. When I did that, I found that the levels needed
slight tweaks (never more than 1 dB) to match the index track's loudness. I did those
8

tweaks, pulled back a few loud yodels on
one track that overstepped their limits, converted the tracks to 16-bit files (they'd been
32-bit floating-point until then), burned a
CD, and sent it off to Bob. He okayed it
and sent it to the plant to be pressed.
What about compression? I found I didn't need to add it; the engineer who did
the original recording had already compressed the signal as much as necessary.
The Loudness War
Before I sign off, I want to mention a
noxious trend that has spread through the
world of audio mastering over the past
decade: the practice of cranking the average level super-high while squashing all
the peaks down to a single level. This
stems from a belief that if your CD is louder than everyone else's, it'll draw the
approving attention of those Gatekeepers.
(I class this as an Urban Legend.)
There are various names for this sort
of slammed audio. I've heard it called
"toothpaste audio" because the waveform on a DAW looks like toothpaste
squeezed from a tube; our Editor prefers
"bricked", both because brickwall limiters are used to create it and because
to his eyes, the waveform is as flat and
featureless as a brick. See Figure 7-
contrast this with Figure 6, a track with
good dynamics. I zoomed in on a peak
from another slammed recording (Figure
8)-you can see that the level maxes out
at 0 dBFS (and tries to get higher).
This sounds bad on the CD, but if the
file is converted to an MP3 for sale as a
download, it sounds really bad-the
algorithm that decides which data to
keep and which to discard in the
process of reducing the file's size chokes
on those momentary overloads, generating all kinds of garbage. The moral's
clear: don't slam your audio-period.
Not quite done
I've given a glimpse of a few bits and
pieces in the mastering process, but there's
more-lots, lots more; I refer you to the
books mentioned at the head of the article.
Meanwhile, we've traced the progress of
our specimen audio clip, Ottoman
Underground's recording of "Arbetsloz",
from the setting up of the microphones to
the mastering. That's the whole story, right?
Well, no. I've left out any mention of
the legalities of making a recording-if
you didn't write the song (as the members
of Ottoman Underground didn't). We'll
go there next month-stay tuned!
Paul J. Stamler (stamler@recordingmag
.com) is a recording musician, engineer,
educator, and collector of bizarre
vintage recordings, living in St. Louis.

66

RECORDING OCTOBER 2016


http://www.orban.com/orban/meter/ http://www.tinyurl.com/propheadvu

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - October 2016

Contents
Recording - October 2016 - Intro
Recording - October 2016 - Cover1
Recording - October 2016 - Cover2
Recording - October 2016 - 1
Recording - October 2016 - 2
Recording - October 2016 - 3
Recording - October 2016 - 4
Recording - October 2016 - 5
Recording - October 2016 - Contents
Recording - October 2016 - 7
Recording - October 2016 - 8
Recording - October 2016 - 9
Recording - October 2016 - 10
Recording - October 2016 - 11
Recording - October 2016 - 12
Recording - October 2016 - 13
Recording - October 2016 - 14
Recording - October 2016 - 15
Recording - October 2016 - 16
Recording - October 2016 - 17
Recording - October 2016 - 18
Recording - October 2016 - 19
Recording - October 2016 - 20
Recording - October 2016 - 21
Recording - October 2016 - 22
Recording - October 2016 - 23
Recording - October 2016 - 24
Recording - October 2016 - 25
Recording - October 2016 - 26
Recording - October 2016 - 27
Recording - October 2016 - 28
Recording - October 2016 - 29
Recording - October 2016 - 30
Recording - October 2016 - 31
Recording - October 2016 - 32
Recording - October 2016 - 33
Recording - October 2016 - 34
Recording - October 2016 - 35
Recording - October 2016 - 36
Recording - October 2016 - 37
Recording - October 2016 - 38
Recording - October 2016 - 39
Recording - October 2016 - 40
Recording - October 2016 - 41
Recording - October 2016 - 42
Recording - October 2016 - 43
Recording - October 2016 - 44
Recording - October 2016 - 45
Recording - October 2016 - 46
Recording - October 2016 - 47
Recording - October 2016 - 48
Recording - October 2016 - 49
Recording - October 2016 - 50
Recording - October 2016 - 51
Recording - October 2016 - 52
Recording - October 2016 - 53
Recording - October 2016 - 54
Recording - October 2016 - 55
Recording - October 2016 - 56
Recording - October 2016 - 57
Recording - October 2016 - 58
Recording - October 2016 - 59
Recording - October 2016 - 60
Recording - October 2016 - 61
Recording - October 2016 - 62
Recording - October 2016 - 63
Recording - October 2016 - 64
Recording - October 2016 - 65
Recording - October 2016 - 66
Recording - October 2016 - 67
Recording - October 2016 - 68
Recording - October 2016 - 69
Recording - October 2016 - 70
Recording - October 2016 - 71
Recording - October 2016 - 72
Recording - October 2016 - 73
Recording - October 2016 - 74
Recording - October 2016 - 75
Recording - October 2016 - 76
Recording - October 2016 - 77
Recording - October 2016 - 78
Recording - October 2016 - 79
Recording - October 2016 - 80
Recording - October 2016 - Cover3
Recording - October 2016 - Cover4
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