Recording / Mastering question.

Simple questions, Complex answer that I will do in point form, I think.
1. The tracks you play have already been mastered.
2. I set my master volume at 0.0 dB and my rec gain at 0.0db
3. You are correct to watch your level and keep below clipping.
4. On clipping, the clip meter comes on 3dB below actual clipping.
5. Turn your limiter off in tractor. give yourself 3-6dB headroom if you must use it. Good gain staging negates its use.
6. When in audacity use your hard limiter effect and set to -1.0dB to remove clips.
7. Only normalize your track if there are quiet tracks and loud tracks…. this will only happen if you have not gained your tracks properly during your set recording.
8. A good wave form should look like….. My opinion only, but a good wave form should neither fill the area nor leave the area empty. There should be some nice ‘transients’ in there.
9. If you have nailed the gains at the beginning signal in, and controlled them to the recorded signal, there should be very, very little to do in audacity due to point 1. It’s worth it to learn this point!
Hope I have helped. 🙂
Drew
Hope this helps.

Good questions!
In my workflow, I hard limit first if it is required, then any other editing (eg fade out at end or removing silence at the start) that’s needed, normalize is the last thing I do before exporting. Stick with the default setting of -1.0dB.

I know some will ask why I hard limit at such a high value and the reason is because I like the transients in my wave form but will remove any clipping.
You could do what they do in TV ads, and hard limit to say -6dB then amplify rather than normalize the whole track to say -1 dB and then you have a really loud track that is well, loud but lacks any dynamics. (IMO this makes for a boring listening experience).

I know many who say auto gain isn’t very good but I find it gets it mostly right.

What you need to do is experiment with your levels, unfortunately the nature of the beast is the same levels wont always work all of the time.
🙂

Yep. That’s what a limiter is meant to do, jump on the obvious threshold breach but not impact at all on the overall sound.

A ‘brickwall’ waveform is not good except for advertising. That’s why ads appear louder than the tv show you are watching even tho they are not.

Another thing you could do is normalize all your tracks individually.
Which leads to the question… Why aren’t all tracks created to have a similar volume level?

Yep. Orange light=autogain, blue light=manual gain.

I use Platinum Notes to fix a few things (like clipped peaks) and normalize all tracks. This is done PRIOR to loading new tracks into the DJ software. Since they are now normalized, I don’t use autogain.

I’ll always check gain levels though and manually correct if necessary.

Greetinx.

In all honesty, I have never used autogain to begin with and I’ll still be watching the level meters and doing fine adjustments with the gain/trim knob. Just that when I forget occasionally (getting older 🙂 ) it’s not that big of a deal anymore. Or in emergency “oh dang, only 20 seconds of tracks left, jam in a new one quick” situations.

And I have PN in my normal workflow for adding tracks now, so I don’t finalize tagging til I am ready to enter tracks into my collection.

Greetinx.