Metering observations and questions (long)
Posted: Fri Dec 15, 2017 8:34 am
I've noticed that there is not much attention given to the matter of metering in the Mixcraft manual, at least I can't find it.
Whether to run one's signals into the yellow, let them hit red every so often, never ever let them hit red, or what.
I got curious about what was going on and started playing with Bitter, Stillwell's free VST utility, http://www.stillwellaudio.com/plugins/bitter/, which claims to monitor sample clipping, intersample clipping, and a bunch of other stuff I don't understand but that is apparently undesirable.
This happened when I rendered a vocoder track to another audio track and the resulting track was slammed, and I realized that my vocoder had been outputting so hot that it had been distorting, which was hard to tell by listening, because, well, it's a vocoder, it sounds weird to begin with.
I put Bitter all over the place, on my Master channel, in between plug-ins, on submixes, and adjusted levels on the song until it said that I was getting no sample clipping. I had to crank stuff way down, and the mix sounded very different by the time I did. Of course, all of my dynamics processing had to be readjusted, compressors, etc. It sounded much "cleaner," to the point where I'm going to start getting cozier with some saturation plug-ins when I get back to it.
The plug-in meters and the track meters at that point were only hitting yellow occasionally, and never touching red, not ever.
So this raises some questions for me.
First, according to the powers that be at Acoustica, when mixing, and when the mix is done, where should my track and plug-in meters be topping out? Should I never let them touch red, ever? Did I miss this in the manual? If not, can we put it in there so that others don't make my mistake?
Is Bitter telling me the truth about the clipping? Things surely did sound cleaner once I got it telling me that I wasn't running Mixcraft into clipping any more.
I've been studying up on the "loudness wars" and trying to master my tracks loud but not too loud and learning how to do that and everything, and to that end I've downloaded some good meters and channel faders such as the Sonalkis and HOFA ones that have LUFS metering built in.
My methodology with this is that I crank the Mixcraft master fader all the way up and use the HOFA one in its place. When the HOFA (or Sonalkis) fader and its meters tell me that I am at -14 LUFS, Mixcraft's master meter is sometimes touching red a little, but when I put Bitter on the bus, and run the finished mixdown through the Orban Loudness analyzer, they say that there is no clipping.
So it would seem that the master meter is calibrated differently from the track meters, because when they even sniff red, Bitter says they are clipping, but Bitter doesn't mind a little red on the master meter. Is the master meter calibrated differently?
Lot of stuff here, I know, but I've been studying all this for a long time and finally got some tools and more understanding around the subject. Thanks in advance for any light shined on the topic!
Whether to run one's signals into the yellow, let them hit red every so often, never ever let them hit red, or what.
I got curious about what was going on and started playing with Bitter, Stillwell's free VST utility, http://www.stillwellaudio.com/plugins/bitter/, which claims to monitor sample clipping, intersample clipping, and a bunch of other stuff I don't understand but that is apparently undesirable.
This happened when I rendered a vocoder track to another audio track and the resulting track was slammed, and I realized that my vocoder had been outputting so hot that it had been distorting, which was hard to tell by listening, because, well, it's a vocoder, it sounds weird to begin with.
I put Bitter all over the place, on my Master channel, in between plug-ins, on submixes, and adjusted levels on the song until it said that I was getting no sample clipping. I had to crank stuff way down, and the mix sounded very different by the time I did. Of course, all of my dynamics processing had to be readjusted, compressors, etc. It sounded much "cleaner," to the point where I'm going to start getting cozier with some saturation plug-ins when I get back to it.
The plug-in meters and the track meters at that point were only hitting yellow occasionally, and never touching red, not ever.
So this raises some questions for me.
First, according to the powers that be at Acoustica, when mixing, and when the mix is done, where should my track and plug-in meters be topping out? Should I never let them touch red, ever? Did I miss this in the manual? If not, can we put it in there so that others don't make my mistake?
Is Bitter telling me the truth about the clipping? Things surely did sound cleaner once I got it telling me that I wasn't running Mixcraft into clipping any more.
I've been studying up on the "loudness wars" and trying to master my tracks loud but not too loud and learning how to do that and everything, and to that end I've downloaded some good meters and channel faders such as the Sonalkis and HOFA ones that have LUFS metering built in.
My methodology with this is that I crank the Mixcraft master fader all the way up and use the HOFA one in its place. When the HOFA (or Sonalkis) fader and its meters tell me that I am at -14 LUFS, Mixcraft's master meter is sometimes touching red a little, but when I put Bitter on the bus, and run the finished mixdown through the Orban Loudness analyzer, they say that there is no clipping.
So it would seem that the master meter is calibrated differently from the track meters, because when they even sniff red, Bitter says they are clipping, but Bitter doesn't mind a little red on the master meter. Is the master meter calibrated differently?
Lot of stuff here, I know, but I've been studying all this for a long time and finally got some tools and more understanding around the subject. Thanks in advance for any light shined on the topic!