Besides being excited at recruiting Beier for Magnatune because he plays so nicely and has a great rep in the lute world, I'm also happy because several of the albums are previously released on labels, now out of print, and he's been able to get the rights back to them. It's always nice to reclaim something from the black hole of copyright & legal hell.
What's interesting is that even real record companies don't bother to professional master the recordings they release. The recording quality is nice on all 3 CDs, but the level is way too low. No-one bothered to normalize these, so they're much softer than other CDs you'd listen to. While have a very soft CD will certainly make the lute seem "gentle" it'll also shock you when the next CD comes on at 2x the volume. Also, the songs are poorly trimmed, with with a lot of empty space at the end of songs (I found one song with 15 secs of empty background hiss at the end)
So, I load up Adobe Audition (formerly known as CoolEdit Pro), and look at the RIPped waveform:
I give it a volume kick, with a tiny amount of limiting for the one spike in the song:
I also noticed a 1/80th of a second blip at the very beginning of the 1st track, probably due to a burn error:
Voila, now it's a perfect album!
How you deal with this for submissions is an interesting technical issue.
For my part I run all my finished wave files through a command line script that uses SOX to gather stats about the song:
sox input.wav -e stat
I nab the two values for the Length of the song and it's recommended volume adjustment and then do:
sox input.wav output.wav vol %SOX_VOLUMEADJUSTMENT% fade p 0 %SOX_LENGTH% 20
This makes all the songs fit into the available space and adds a nice fade to the end.
This is kind of like a poor man's mastering method that assumes the song is in finished form already. In your case you would likely drop the fade off of this.
This could have many uses in your system, since you might want to run new submissions through the stats check and let people know if their files does not meet with your standards.
Posted by: William Radcliffe | March 11, 2004 at 10:30 AM
The mastering may have been lousy, but did you consider that the styles of mastering have changed, and that the previous work may have had different goals?
Many modern CDs are mastered to be much louder than older CDs, and this is a major beef among some mastering engineers. Excessive compression can kill the dynamics in the music.
One other issue is that some people prefer to master so that the music's volume levels will be appropriate to the music, so that if you put in a disk of heavy metal music, it's really loud, but if you put in a disk of soft lute music, it plays softly. Compression and normalization can make the lute music sound as loud as the heavy metal.
Certainly, if you're preparing files for MP3 data compression, you're probably best off to normalize it.
Posted by: Jim | April 27, 2004 at 10:06 AM
They are hand and glove...
Posted by: Rod | May 04, 2004 at 08:03 AM