Hi, i'm not sure if this has been brought up. I am using Sonar 8 (producer version), and I have a question for the good people of this forum. I recently did a song and uploaded it to my artist page. A poster said the song was good (yada yada) but the only issue he had with it was mixing/mastering. He said it wasn't loud enough.
Now I have followed my music bars (as I call them) when I mix and master projects. I don't let them go into the red area because the handbook tells you not to do that. Yet I have let my stuff go into the red area and the only thing I notice is...more louder. I don't get distortion or anything of that nature so I really don't know.
Anyway some feedback would be nice on this.
Here is the song
Yes...I curse...Yes it would be considered hip hop.

There's been countless of threads about loudness. It's one of the most common questions. The peaks don't make your track loud, but the average level, RMS. You need to use both volume envelopes on tracks, track compression and finally compression/limiting in the mastering phase to get loud wavs without clipping. Appropriate EQing and other stuff according to need and will as well, naturally.
 
If you try to compress everything in one go, the results may not be satisfying. If you record in 24 bit you don't need to go higher than about -12 dB during tracking. 

E.I.T.S
i'm not sure if this has been brought up.

Yeh, it's been discussed a time or two.
 
Short answer: hip hop by convention is expected to be rather squashed dynamically. IOW, "loud". Throw on a limiter (TB Barricade is a good but inexpensive choice if you don't already have a limiter) and push it until it's loud enough. So how loud is loud enough?
 
Import a commercial track that's similar to your own into your project. Route it to the main outputs rather than the master bus. Put the limiter on your master bus, them push up the input gain (or lower the threshold, depending on the limiter) until your song sounds as loud as the reference track.