Great stuff guys!!

Yeah, my pieces have a fair bit of dynamics in them as I seem to be getting more into the acoustic side of things...I'm still pretty primitive with my song writing skills though...lol!

Normalization is what was being talked about there.

Where the relative levels are maintained as in the original recording only the loudest peak reaches the ceiling level everything else maintains the same relative (normal) levels as the performance.

Maximisation was the OP's term made, I would guess in some perverse hope of feeling superior to those who fell into the, use a limiter to push the levels up to a constant RMS level trap.

Normalisation gets a bad press, often because it is misunderstood and consequently misused, but it has its use, and this is it.

Check this brief mastering tutorial:  http://soundcloud.com/monolake/mastering-a-step-by-step-guide. Very amusing.

bitflipper


Check this brief mastering tutorial:  http://soundcloud.com/monolake/mastering-a-step-by-step-guide. Very amusing.

I think that guy may have mastered some of the Cakewalk video audio I've heard.

 Is it possible to have "loudness" reinforced with ample bass or low end response while having wide range dynamics in the mids and upper mids?

 It seems like some types of music pull that off.

 On the latest two songs I worked on, I will probably continue to second guess myself... should I have pumped up the quiet passages a bit as I did? Should I have fully exploited the available dynamic range and left the quiet passages quiet so the loud sections sounded even louder?

 I kept reminding myself that I enjoyed the widest dynamic range in a quiet studio setting but that it seemed impractical in car with noisy tires and air conditioning.

 So I choose to suggest that we make a compromise and bump up the quiet passages a bit.

 best regards,
mike

So I choose to suggest that we make a compromise and bump up the quiet passages a bit.

Which is a completely different to pitching a rhetorical question whether it's a good idea to 'maximise' to -14db RMS.  All of a sudden it changes to a suggestion to bump up the quiet passages a bit...

The Piano concerto I referred to wasn't designed to be listened to in a car nor a busy environment, it was designed to be listened to in a concert hall and the listener giving it full attention.  Any bumping up of the quiet passages would have been written into the piece differently if that was what was required.

What was the term you used?  Jousting at windmills I beleive.

Nice to see a humble suggestion for a change though, it's a step in the right direction at least.  It will likely take you much further than snarkiness such as this.

http://forum.cakewalk.com/fb.ashx?m=2575612

Normalisation gets a bad press, often because it is misunderstood and consequently misused, but it has its use, and this is it.

Certainly something I've mis-understood and as a result rarely used it rather than misuse. Thanks for the straightforward explanation.

An interesting place we've landed up at here. Either the maximising question in the other thread is, as people have suggested, an insincere snarky one, and Mike's post above is part of an attempt to cover that by pretending it's on the level. Or... it's actually a sincere question, but one about something so novice-level, it seriously throws into doubt Mike's claims of... let's call it adequacy. Which would YOU choose? It's a knotty one.

John T


An interesting place we've landed up at here. Either the maximising question in the other thread is, as people have suggested, an insincere snarky one, and Mike's post above is part of an attempt to cover that by pretending it's on the level. Or... it's actually a sincere question, but one about something so novice-level, it seriously throws into doubt Mike's claims of... let's call it adequacy. Which would YOU choose? It's a knotty one.

I don't have a dog in this hunt but it sure is entertaining to watch.

I guess I find it hard to square Mike's constant claims of expertise and years of experience with the idea that he's encountered a quiet / loud mixing problem for the first time in May 2012. One element or another of this is bullsh!t.