Hi all,

Saturday night a friend and I got to see a Ska & Reggae legend, Ernest Ranglin.  I have to say he put on a hell of a show for an 81 year old!  Saw him in a great venue with a very good new sound system; Bob Weir et al.'s new Sweetwater Music Hall in Mill Valley, CA.

Anyway, that was just the occasion that got me to finally breakdown and buy a digital recorder (Olympus LS-14).  I was very happy with the recording I got (16 bit, 44 Hz). .  It is all one file (~ 1.2 Gb WAV). 
I've never worked with material like this before (live band, whole concert recorded to a single stereo track).

I was wondering if anyone who works with this kind of material could give me a few pointers on best practices.  Firstly, I'm wondering what is best as far as splitting the recording into individual songs and how to handle that.  Individual projects but put them all in one top level folder??

As far as mixing (or would you refer to this as Mastering since you're working with just a stereo track of all the instruments), I've taken a quick pass with a little EQ ( FF ProQ) and Ozone5 on the Master and got pretty close in a relatively short amount of time.  The preset that sounded like the best starting point was "4 Band Master - Excitation and Widening".  I added a little compression to this  The bass and kick low end need a little more tweaking in my opinion.  The bass is pretty strong around 100-120 Hz, but doesn't have enough low end punch.  Also, there is a little muddiness from the kick overlapping with the bass.  Since I'm used to dealing with individual tracks, I don't have a good feel for a good way to cleaning this up some.

Any and all advice and help would be deeply appreciated!

i'd use the lp-64 eq, add as many nodes as you need... 

perhaps the lp-64 multiband, perhaps a touch of breverb, not enough to really hear, just enough to glue it together...


and, yes, you're essentially mastering it.

You will get the job done faster and easier if you use a wave editing program like Wave Lab. It has all the tools to edit the file sonicly and edit into individual tracks. 
I do these type of recordings all the time and here's a few things I might do. 

First off you probably never moved the recorder and the sound stayed the same through the whole show. This makes a global treatment of the whole file easier. It's a lot more work to render each track after you split them up. But sometimes this is nessasary if the sound or music style changes. 
So first thing I always do is run the normalize function and look for the peak level. It's usually low as I record on the safe side. I'll Normalize to say -2Db depending on the music. Then I might do a Hi Pass filter to get rid of background noise. I find these little recorders have a nice natural sound so EQ is not usually required. Personal choice. 

Then if your lucky there's no more to do other than edit the file into the songs and cut out chit chat, fade the applause etc.  The thing is with a wave editor is these functions are all right there under the mouse.  

Thanks dlion. The Multiband might be just the trick. I'll give it a go.

Hi Cactus Thanks for the tips. I'll definitely apply them. Checked out WaveLab, looks good and the Elements price isn't too bad. Just wish they had a trial version like they do for some of their other products. So I'll have to stew on that for a bit. Thanks again and have a good weekend.

I used WAVE LAB yesterday to split a friend's tracks in a similar manner.... it took about 2 minutes total to split the tracks, save them and attach them back to him. 

For more in depth "mastering" .... if they are waves, import them into Sonar and use Ozone and EQ's and have fun.  You can also split the tracks in Sonar..... 

For simple splits, WaveLab or Audacity I think would be quicker and easier. Plus, they work with MP3 without converting it. If you use Sonar on an MP3.... and have not purchased the MP3 function..... you will export a wave made from an mp3..... that is a problem when you start converting back to mp3 regarding the resolution issues. 

Hi GH.

My recording is a WAV file so I don't have the back and forth with the WAV MP3 thing.
Appreciate your feedback on WaveLab. Do you have the full version or Elements?
Thanks.