Quality loss on Mastering

I'm Trying to do some basic mastering with Sonar PE 6 and I find that it doesn't sound as good on the final product as it does listening to it out of Sonar. This is how I'm mastering:
 
-Exporting entire mix in stereo with all busses and sends
-opening new file for song and applying Ozone 3 for mastering processor
-after getting my prefered sound, exporting again using entire mix as wave file - PWR 2 dithering  - 44.1 - and 24 bit.
 
Is this a bad way to master? Should I be using "what you hear"?
Any suggestions would be great and here is the link to the song  if anyone cares to hear what I'm talking about. http://www.soundclick.com/bands/default.cfm?bandID=805324&content=music
THanks alot.
 
al
 
 

Perhaps you are simply enjoying the full 64bit experience (squeezed thru the 24bit pipe) and then when you master down to 16bit you can hear it?

I hear a very slight loss of quality when I go from my project to the 16/44 wav file.

Maybe you do too?

best regards,
mike

Thanks guys. I do agree with Hack in that with each different play medium it sounds different. I have M audio SP-5B monitors which tend to understate the lows a little bit but I trust them and I'm becoming familiar with their shortfalls.


Mike - I thought the same thing about chopping the file down to low bits so I used the same export as mentioned about except I substituted a large wave file for the MP3 file. Still the same thing.

Bit - It seems to me that the best way I can describe the sound difference is a possible phase issue in the high mids. When playing through Sonar the vox and middle cymbals are nicely separated and sound very smooth but in the final MP3 file these frequencies sound a bit harsh to me. I can't seem to get that smoothness that you get in your stuff.

THanks


al

'Mastering' is from the Latin for 'destroy', at least these days. Personally, I take the approach that no one is ever going to pay you anything for your music in this day and age anyway, so don't try to compete in a non-existant market by crushing or otherwise abusing your music. Mix it like you want it to sound and leave it at that. They have a volume knob, they can turn it up if they want.

after getting my prefered sound, exporting again using entire mix as wave file - PWR 2 dithering  - 44.1 - and 24 bit.

I presume you meant 16 bit? If not, then no dithering is happening either way and it's still in 24 bit mode as it would be within SONAR. You didn't say what sample rate you were at though, perhaps some of it is sample rate conversion?

You should be able to make an mp3 from the 24 bit master.  Sound Forge does it now, anyway.  And always start w/ the highest resolution copy to do changes.  So if you start w/ a 24 bit and dither that down to 16 bit and then use it to make an mp3 there is bound to be degredation along the way.  And yes, an mp3 can sound different, and usually not in a good way.

What Dean was saying about mastering is that the tools available to people today are  usually above their ability to handle correctly.  A lot of commercial stuff is over compressed, etc.  If you try to match it you are just going to sound like a lesser imitation of a bad sound.  I"ve heard a lot of good musicians ruin their stuff during "mastering."   So it is pretty purposeless to try to match radio loudness.  Give yourself a db or two headroom and your music will likely sound better for it.  And nobody will notice the loss of a volume - and if they do, that is what the vol knob is for.

@

picklebunker

Dean - Thanks for the encouraging words about people paying to hear my music. I think I'll just crawl into a hole now and smash my guitar for firewood. Anyone want to buy a slightly smashed Kramer?
 
THanks for all the help.
 
Al

Of course I wasn't talking about your music specifically, but just music in general. The music industry is tanking at a rapid rate due to the fact that more and more people every year are just stealing it instead of paying for it. It's a dying industry, where before the industry was maybe something like a handful of really large stars at the top, followed by a slow blend down to the wannbes, now with all the theft it's seeming more like a handful of really large stars at the top, followed by a sparsely populated wasteland, and then people struggling to make it at all. The money that was there to provide the hand up for those wannabes who proved themselves on the touring circuit came from the profits from the big stars. But those profits are vastly down now due to theft. So only more and more straight down the line, corporate friendly acts will get any investment.
 
The whole do it yourself, labels are useless thing that so many people throw around, seems to me to be just seriously wishful thinking. No one has ever come even remotely close to getting the kind of visibility via self-promotion as the labels provide. The folks who are benefitting from the internet are the ones who already had high visibility via label promotion in the past. The internet is a pull medium, not a push medium. It's great for people who know what they want to come find it (and unfortunately to get it without paying for it.) Marketing is a push activity, not nearly as effective on a pull medium.
 
What most people seem to think marketing is today is spamming forums, which of course destroys those forums and turns them into massive self-promotional circle jerks, as happened to Myspace most famously of late and which seems poised to effectively destroy it. To really make it, you need to be widely known. To be widely known, you need either money, or a huge amount of luck to get someone who has very wide visbility to heavily promote you without you paying them a lot of money, which is even more unlikely.
 
And the money is just going away. There has been progress of late. The government is finally getting serious about cracking down to file sharing to some degree. It's not a lot but even a little is way more than before. They've siezed a number of sites so far and more activity is going on. So maybe there will be a slow movement back in the other direction. But it'll be tough. A whole generation has grown up believing that they have the right to take anything that they can find on the internet, and you tell them they can't, they'll actually call you a Nazi or some such. That doesn't bode well for the future of music, which is the most popular and the most stealable digital content.
 
Add to all that the fact that the 'democratization' of music now means that instead of 10,000 bands you have to compete against who have gotten far enough along to have their music publically visible in some way, you now have 10,000,000 bands to compete against, the bulk of whom aren't any good, but that doesn't help because there's nothing particular to make yours stand out from that huge wall of sound unless you have good marketing. And of course many of these bands are part timers who are happy to give away their music in a desparate attempt to get some attention, which just contributes even more to the devaluation of music for those folks who need to actually sell it to survive.
 
I'm not trying to make you suicidal, but anyone going into this business without facing these facts squarely is doing themselvs a disservice.

Sorry, but you are incorrect. When you see numbers for digital sales, that's individual songs. When you see numbers for CDs, that's whole CDs. Sales in a per-song unit type basis is half what it was in 1999. So obviously the music industry is not just doing fine.

As to your arguments about CD prices, they are also completely incorrect. The average cost of a CD is nothing like $20 these days. You can buy CDs on Amazon for $10 and $12 all day long. The price of CDs has actually dropped in real dollars, on top of 2x inflation since they came out. So they are incredibly good values these days.

And the argument that all this downloading is going on because of the music industry being slow on providing legal downloads is clearly wrong on the face of it. The kids downloading all that music don't give a crap about the past. Half of them probably weren't even music consumers in 1999 when all of this began. They download it because they can, and there's a massive propoganda machine on the internet that does anything it can to make the people being stolen from out to be the evil ones. The fact that digital sales isn't a fraction of making up for lost CD sales despit having been available for many years now, while illegal downloads has gotten larger and larger each year pretty much proves that it's not lack of legal alternatives that drives illegal downloading.
 
And of course there are large business interests who are doing VERY well from this. You think that broadband internet access has grown so much so that people can send e-mails? Not hardly. Illegal downloads have been a huge part of driving the growth of large ISPs, and of course the companies that sell the hardware to provide that bandwidth. So the folks creating digital content are being screwed on both ends, by consumers and by the folks who provide the pipeline through which it is stolen. 
 
As to the content quality, that's a very bogus argument. There's LOTS of great content out there. But, teenagers today, just like teenagers of yesterday, aren't necessarily interested in the quality of the music, just that it's their music. Lady Gaga, whatever you think of her, is enormous in terms of consumption of her music. Sales, OTOH, are a fraction of what they would have been before downloading began. You can go just to Youtube and search for her and the first page worth of videos will add up to not far from a billion views. Converted to song equivalents, that's equal to 100M albums. And that leaves aside all of teh many other ways in which her music is gotten without actually buying it. Some of those videos are at least put their by her label, so that they can get some monetization of that viewing, but it's piddly even compared to selling digital singles.
 
Anyway, if your taste in music is such that you only like bands that have one good song per album, then you are yourself part of the problem, and you can't complain about the quality of the music because you, just like all those other kids doing that downloading, are rewarding the one good song band instead of the 10 good songs band.
 

BTW - a few posts up AT was saying that most people don't know how to use the tools they have. It's so true. I went to school back in the 80's for sound engineering and learned how to splice 2" tape, demagnitize heads, and Protools was a 4 track prototype. I have no clue what I'm doing these days. When I hear so many people telling me to leave so much headroom on a track I think, "what are you crazy, think about low level tape hiss!" I was trained to always track all of the dynamics processing because even a full rack only had a half a dozen effects processors. All I learned back in the day could be summerized in a half hour You Tube video. Too much graphing and numbers in music these days, not enough ears. Too much Melodyning, too little practicing. 

As little as I know, I still love it though.

I'm a Music Technology major.  Through the course of my schooling, I've attended plenty of lectures from successful independent artists, publishers and managers.  At least four of my instructors were working engineers/producers. 

Every single one of them says the same thing when it comes to downloading and free access to music:  The internet has been GOOD for artists, engineers and producers.  This from the REAL working professionals from the REAL world.  So what if it's bad for the fat cats that can't get any richer with their old business model?  Cry me a river.  Bottom line is, the people that will be successful with this new digital medium are the ones that will learn to embrace it and adapt to it.  The record companies should take some notes.

Anyway, I totally came into this thread because I was wondering about mastering too.  I was about to make a new thread but I figured I could just jump into this one since some pretty smart people are participating and could maybe answer a couple of my questions too.

Once I'm done recording, I mix my levels, add my effects and generally get the mix sounding how I want it.  Some of you may remember that that first set of tracks I posted were super quiet and needed to have the speakers cranked to listen to them.  Well, my trial version of my MP3 encoder expired, but it would still export the files as a Wave. (I'm using Sonar7 Home Studio, Windows 7, 4G RAM, 64 bit system).

So I would then import the Wave into Audacity to bounce it down to MP3 as the encoder on Audacity works just fine.  Well, once I started using Audacity for that, I noticed that there are some effects in there available as well.  My general process works like this:

Import the wav into Audacity.  As expected, it is a faint signal, nowhere NEAR peak levels.  Select all audio, go to Effects, click on Amplification, add anywhere from 3-5dB using the slider, click OK.  Then I repeat the same process for compression.  If need be, I can select specific regions and apply EQ as well.  After all of this, I end up with a much louder signal that is just as clear as my original mix.  I'm still learning the fine balance between a mix that's dry/flat and a mix that's oversaturated with effects, but I'm getting closer every day.

That being said, do any of you guys know how I could duplicate this mastering process in Sonar7?  I don't mind Audacity THAT much, but there are certain things that bug me about it.  Plus, I just feel like I shouldn't need to use an entirely different software to accomplish something as simple as I do in Audacity, besides use it for its MP3 encoder, of course.

Cheers,
Reid

Excellent thoughts all.

I hope Dean is right ... so I can get on with life ... just composing etc. ... not worrying about keeping up with the Jones' next door ... etc.

Some ponderings:

1) Keeping things in 24-bit ... from track to Master ... and avoiding dithering steps as much as possible.  So that, methinks, ... Doubtless the MP3 sounds best when dithered directly from 24-bit waves-files ... or perhaps better yet ... directly from Sonar exports (if that's an option).

2) Use players that support 24-bit wave Codecs if feasible.  I know that is difficult, some of the better iPods and radio phones barely accept 24-bit waves and others have limited 'players' for 24-bit waves.  My AT&T phone reluctantly plays 24-bit waves (with no Equalizer in the browser)  But, the real problem is #3 below:

3) Virtually all USB car players I've encountered (Toyota JVR, Honda, 3rd party electronics, etc.)  do not support 24-bit players.  (I hate going through the fr!cken radio auxillary port which ... damages all music and my ears ... to be sure). 

Some USB car player can barely handle 16-bit waves on flash drives.  Despite bluetooth ... they are an audiophile's nightmare ... playing MP3s and WMAs through USB and/or Bluetooth.  'Tis best, IMHO, to 'fall back' on the CD you/I've burned ... to make rash decisions in the car.

4) In the car things sound a bit boxish ... and at loud volumes the Fletcher-Munson saturations turn vocs into mush ... in the busy mixes.  Yet, I never boost the 2k-10k region on my masters!  It is sickening to my ears at low volumes to hear the 8k sibs and vox blemishes.  Instead, the car equalizer can boost the 2k-10k region while driving at 60mph.

5) I'd better get off the caffeine and finish this Trillion installation (35Gbytes)

Search this forum. Somebody posted complete step-by-step instructions for configuring LAME with SONAR. LAME has to be downloaded from here.

My only comment is I like the song!
 
SORRY!!  ;)

My only comment is I like the song!

+1