I get nothing but a hiss noise

peggysuechan


I make sure the thingy doesn't go into the pink area, above the 6 in the track view. I should make the thingy go even lower?

bitflipper

I make sure the thingy doesn't go into the pink area, above the 6 in the track view. I should make the thingy go even lower?

"I make sure the thingy doesn't go into the pink area" - don't let those Coffee House jokers get hold of that one!

If you're working in a purely analog environment, the rule is simple: keep every meter in the signal chain out of the red, in order to avoid clipping at every stage. That applies to everything from your mic preamp to your effects to your tape machine. (OK, the tape machine is forgiving and is routinely hit hard, but even it has limits and can also produce unpleasant distortion when driven too hard.)

In the digital realm we're given a lot more room for sloppiness, at least in SONAR. That's because SONAR works with floating-point data internally. The handy thing about floating-point data is if the number ever gets too big, we just scootch the decimal point over and we're good. It is virtually impossible to damage a signal as long as it's stored and manipulated as floating-point data.

But digital-to-analog converters do not work with floating-point numbers. At that stage, our audio has to return to the world of integer, fixed-point representation. At that stage, you get 24 bits (or 16 bits) to work with, period. Once you've used all 24 (or 16) of them up then there's no place left to go, and severe distortion results.

But that nastiness only happens at the final stage of the recording process. Up until then, you can peg the meters into the red if you want to (it's still not a good idea, though) and no harm will come to your signal. (Yeh, there are esoteric arguments about loss of resolution, loss of bits, but don't worry about that - it's rarely a significant concern.)

What we're talking about here is the final output levels, which usually means the output of your mastering limiter. That's where you want to make sure you stay out of the red.

You also don't want to drive your limiter so hard that it has no headroom to work within. Drive the limiter too hot and it can't do its thing, which is to decide how much of that headroom to use. It will dutifully keep your output under control, but it may horribly mangle your sound in the process. Since most limiters have an input trim control, all you have to do is turn that control down. That way, no matter what you're throwing at the limiter it'll bring it down to a sensible level before applying limiting. If your limiter doesn't have an input control, you can use the bus trim instead.

So the short answer can be condensed to three rules:
1. Try to keep your tracks out of the red but don't obsess over it. 1 or 2db into the red is usually OK.
2. Make sure the levels going in to the limiter are -6db or lower
3. Make sure the output of the limiter is -1db to -3db, the latter recommended if the next step is MP3 encoding

 
http://mediacoder.sourceforge.net/index.htm
Media Coder looks to be dead code now, any other good options?