Sonar Burned CD Volume Versus Commercial

Does the main out (master fader) have any mastering effects plugged in to the fx bin?

The answer to your question to why the volume is softer is probably because you are burning the tracks straight out of Sonar with no mastering, and the tracks you are comparing it to are mastered finished CD's. Just a guess


Josephusmusic.com

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Import a commercial, loud track and your own .wav-file into SONAR and compare the waveforms.

Very likely, what you see is:
The the waveform of the commercial track looks like a two-by-four wood board and your waveform looks like a waveform. SONAR's burning functions have nothing to do with this, only your mastering skills and knowledge.

To produce a destroyed, over-compressed track (which is the trend today) takes some experience and good plugins. Just compressing hard in one go does seldom give the desired results.

What you are doing here is competing against cheaters. Major labels drive the master to clipping. If you try to produce a HiFi master that sounds as loud with no clipping you will lose. That's like trying to play ball as good as the guy hitting the roids.

The short answer is:

Use compression on your tracks with the greatest dynamic range (volume differences), heavy if necessary, but always check to make sure you're not compressing the life out of it. Pretty subjective.

If necessary and possible, go to the audio tracks with the highest transients (brief bursts of volume) and use an audio editor like V for Vocals in Sonar Producer to reduce the volume of that specific bit of audio with the high volume peak.

At this point, if you have the right software, normalize any tracks where the peaks are way below 0 Db. If you don't have normalizing software (process > audio > normalize in Sonar PE 8), then figure out where the peaks are for each track and boost the gain to get 'em just under 0.

Apply a limiter to the master track to stop the highest peaks dead in their tracks at a certain volume below 0 Db. Again, check the sound after you do this. Is it what you want? Mastering software packages, like Ozone 4 that I use, usually have a loudness maximizer that handles this phase. If you don't have mastering software, you might be able to find a loudness maximizer online, e.g., at kvraudio.com, although don't quote me on that.

CJ, I've read numerous items and discussions, including many helpful posts by you. I mentioned the Urban Tribe "Guilty" sample to try to take the tracking and mixing issues (and pre-mastering) out of the question and see if there is something simple perhaps in the conversion to wave, some setting that we are missing. The tracks and mix in "Guilty" are excellent and the mastering effects in Sonar are used. Now, I don't mean to imply that our tracks and mix are as good as "Guilty" but they're not bad. Either way, the "Guilty" burn to CD ends up the same low volume as our work.

So a large part of my question is whether we are missing a setting in the conversion to wave and burning process. Of course, it is very helpful to hear your tips (Kim, CJ and others) on pre-mastering and mastering, especially if it can be done solely with the tools in Sonar 8 Producer, without the need for Ozone or other outside software. Please assume that we are starting with good tracks and a good mix, like "Guilty," and let me know if we are missing a setting in conversion and burning and if we can reach near commercial level with Producer alone. I'd hate for someone to blow out their speakers when our CD ejects and a commercial CD starts playing at twice the level.

ORIGINAL: craigt

CJ, I've read numerous items and discussions, including many helpful posts by you. I mentioned the Urban Tribe "Guilty" sample to try to take the tracking and mixing issues (and pre-mastering) out of the question and see if there is something simple perhaps in the conversion to wave, some setting that we are missing. The tracks and mix in "Guilty" are excellent and the mastering effects in Sonar are used. Now, I don't mean to imply that our tracks and mix are as good as "Guilty" but they're not bad. Either way, the "Guilty" burn to CD ends up the same low volume as our work.

So a large part of my question is whether we are missing a setting in the conversion to wave and burning process. Of course, it is very helpful to hear your tips (Kim, CJ and others) on pre-mastering and mastering, especially if it can be done solely with the tools in Sonar 8 Producer, without the need for Ozone or other outside software. Please assume that we are starting with good tracks and a good mix, like "Guilty," and let me know if we are missing a setting in conversion and burning and if we can reach near commercial level with Producer alone. I'd hate for someone to blow out their speakers when our CD ejects and a commercial CD starts playing at twice the level.

If you have a wav editor you can "see" exactly what will go on the CD. No guess work at all. Just make sure your final master is 44.1 at 16 bit (ready for CD). Any wav editor will show what the waveform looks like, how far you are from hitting the wall and as you zoom in on parts that look like they have, you can see if the wav is clipped (flat top). It's that simple. Some wav editing software even has a tool to find clipped waveforms so you know for sure if there are any. This also lets you rip in store bought CDs and see just how messed up they are.

You should also use a CD burning tool that does NOT make any changes. This is a good reason to not use CD burning software to do mastering. If anything changes on the fly as it burns that means you didn't get a chance to see it and verify if it was OK. All the CD burning software should do is put down the table of contents with your track IDs and burn the audio (encoded to red book standard) to the rest of the disk. You should never let it sample rate convert, bit level convert, EQ, make gain changes, or anything. You should do that in the wav editor like SoundForge, Wavelab, Audicity, etc. The master should be "what-you-see-is-what-you-get". This does mean you need to get to 44.1 / 16bit before loading the audio into the CD burning software.

Side note. Remember the CD format does not really have tracks. In the software it looks like you do as you import a wav file per song but that's only to make it easy for the software to create the track IDs for you. In some CD software it will let you bring the entire CD in as one huge wav file and then put the track IDs in by hand. This is very nice when you want to put a live performance on CD with track IDs between songs but no gap. This also lets you do things like hidden tracks (leave out an ID).

On the CD there are no tracks, just the table of contents and one big blob of audio that includes all songs. The CD player reads in the table of contents into memory when you put the CD in (that's why it takes a little bit). Those track IDs have numbers that tell the CD player where to seek to find each song. In the case of a hidden track you can "fool" the CD player by not giving it an ID between the last two songs for example. In some CD burning software you can even leave a gap between the end ID of a track and the Start ID of the next track. That will cause some CD players to display a countdown. Another cool trick. Sony CD Architect and Vegas will both let you do that stuff and freely move, add and delete track IDs. Nero will also do that but it's not as easy.

The secret weapon is the volume knob on your amp.

Make your stuff as dynamic as it needs to be during mixing. Then master it with comp/limiter. I have stuff that comes out as loud as commercial stuff and some that doesn't. The funny thing is, usually thin arrangements sound loudest. And when I make comps to play (from CDs, albums and my own stuff) albums invariably are the softest - even hard rock. And often the smoothest, too. I have to bring down the newer music (including my own) to get an OK level between all songs.

Don't worry about matching the volume wars. Make your stuff sound the best you can and needles be damned. If you ever make it to radio, they'll have a mastering engineer to over-comp it for you. Or pay to retrack and mix it.

@

Got somewhat off message in the last part of my last post. Can we get our songs to near commercial CD level using only the tools within Sonar 8 Producer, and what are the mastering tools in S8PE that will do the trick? In other words, when our tracks are satisfactory and they are mixed as we like them with the dynamics we want but at -18dB, -12dB or even -6dB, what tools in what order in S8PE alone will get us to 0dB, if possible?

Craigt:
This has nothing to do with SONAR, but the way your stuff is mastered, either in SONAR or whatever. You can place compressors and limiters to maximize the rms level as much as you want. Finding a good balance of highest level with not too bad quality requires good techniques, knowledge and tools. The problem is that the latest commercial releases are so loud that they sound like crap (latest from Marilyn Manson, NIN, Prodigy, etc, horrible for me), and you are not going to do it better no matter how good are you. At current levels it's impossible to avoid quality degradation to unaceptable levels.
What we say is: FORGET THE LOUDNESS BATTLE, WE ALL LOST IT ALREADY! Just make it sound well. Perhaps as loud as you can manage without compromising quality in a noticeable amount, but no more. Note that many players today use ReplayGain, the loudness will be adjusted automatically at playback so that all tracks have the same perceived loudness. Pushing your average level will only make it sound worse, not louder. The same will happen if your tracks are broadcasted: the radio stations will compress everything a lot, so it will sound as bad and loud as anyone else's regardless of what you did.
The recommended rms levels are -12 dB FS for CD media and -20 dB FS for higher res media like DVD or cinema. If you still feel bad with your levels being lower than "Joe Destroyer" latest release, just stick a note to your material:
"This music has been mastered for optimum quality. If your playback system supports automatic level control (ReplayGain), the playback level will be automatically adjusted for your best experience. Otherwise, you may need to raise your playback volume to hear it as loud as lower quality sources."
I think this is better than having to say:
"This music sounds so bad because we wanted it to sound louder than anything else, even if we had to degrade the quality so much. If your system supports ReplayGain, you will not notice the difference in loudness, but we are sorry to tell you that the quality degradation is unrecoverable in any case. If your playback system does not support ReplayGain, please lower the volume before starting playback to avoid possible damage to your ears or speakers."
Now, if you are going the "Joe The Destroyer" way, place in your master section a multiband compressor, followed by a fast compressor, followed by another fast compressor, and finally a limiter, and learn how to obtain the most out of them.

We very much want to keep the dynamics. My buddy has one of the first CDs ever made by a group of engineers who were also musicians to demonstrate the dynamics available on CD that were not possible to obtain with vinyl. The song we are concentrating on now begins with a chord fingerpicked note by note on a nylon stringed guitar with the lead female vocal and nothing else, with other instruments brought in at the end of the first verse. We'd like to avoid a squashed sound at all costs. Yesterday (before we saw Ohhey's post) my buddy used a wave editor he'd used before to bring up the volume on the wave file without squashing it and got it to a decent volume though still noticeably softer to our ears than similarly structured songs on the "Rent Broadway Cast" CD.

At this point what your are trying to accomplish is not possible. 0dBFS in digital is the limit and the only way to retain dynamics is to reduce the average or RMS signal level from there. And that will always cause your output to sound quieter than a commercially squished CD.

Your two goals are mutually exclusive, you may have loud without dynamics, or dynamics without loud. I generally compromise with my masters with a RMS level between -15 and -10, and if you use high quality compression and limiting to do it, you will be fine. This can be done in Sonar with the right plugs.

ORIGINAL: craigt
....... My buddy has one of the first CDs ever made by a group of engineers who were also musicians to demonstrate the dynamics available on CD that were not possible to obtain with vinyl. ........

How ironic... you now have to buy the vinyl LP to get any dynamics. They can't make an LP as bad as they can CD, it's just not possible. So almost any album that you can get now on both media will have more dynamics on LP. So sad...

isn't this whole thread, just simply about learning how to master?

+1 Ozone4

You can download the demo for free.

ORIGINAL: pollux

Hi,
Commercial CDs are mastered in dedicated facilities, with specially set up rooms.
You won't see any 284 channel SSL console (reduce reflexions), nor huge ADAM main monitors in there (the flat response at high volume is not needed), like in a mixing studio.

Key things are very (very) high quality AD/DA converters, a few selected effects, a crystal clear amp, and specifically tailored monitors (NOT mixing monitors). There are also very tight quality control constraints, like the number of digital errors per second in the master CD.

Honestly, I don't think that many serious mastering facilities are using TRacks, Ozone or anything like that.. not even ProTools mastering plugins.. Those are very useful for doing pseudo-mastering, and getting songs sound right up to a certain level.. but high end stuff (I mean where serious bucks are) requires that little extra bit that cannot be achieved without those key things...

my 0.2 cts :)

LOL !!! It makes me wonder why they would bother with all that good gear when the final product is a distorted pile of $#!%. It sure would be a shame if there were "errors" and one of those flat top waves had a slightly rounded corner... could ruin the listening experiance. If they want to impress me with their $%#@!&* mastering lab they need to call me back when they have some decent content.

ORIGINAL: ohhey
LOL !!! It makes me wonder why they would bother with all that good gear when the final product is a distorted pile of $#!%. It sure would be a shame if there were "errors" and one of those flat top waves had a slightly rounded corner... could ruin the listening experiance. If they want to impress me with their $%#@!&* mastering lab they need to call me back when they have some decent content.

Yep.. like the outcome of American Idol for example.. I guess they have residual gear from the old times where real music was done lol

ORIGINAL: batsbrew
yep, and then dumb it down to a mp3.

yes, so kids can listen on an ipod with crappy headphones at 120 Db lol