about the Master Track

[RichardT]

.. also don't forget the advice you got earlier about playback format. I.e - you will need to leave room at the top for lossy formats like MP3. If you cut it too close to the red for a lossless format like WAV (I know that's probably swearing) you might tip over when it gets rendered down to MP3. It just happens that way. One word you will hear a LOT in all of this over time is "compromise".

I was always planning on making it a WAV file because of the higher quality. Would that be ok then?
I don't need to go lower in that regard because I don't want it to be an mp3.
Also, as a heads-up, the master track I have it -0.3db. It's a good position to be.

If the music is just for your use, that's fine, but if you intend to distribute it to streaming services then you should be aiming for peaks no higher than -1 dBFS.

[amanise]

...
I was always planning on making it a WAV file because of the higher quality. Would that be ok then?
I don't need to go lower in that regard because I don't want it to be an mp3.
Also, as a heads-up, the master track I have it -0.3db. It's a good position to be.

As some others said - distortions can be subtle and hard to hear at first

If you're 'never' going to want to stream it - that should work for you. But, if in a few years time you want to stream your Greatest Hits album - you might want a compressed format then? You wouldn't want to have to go back to the project file and re-render it another half a Db quieter so you could stream it without problems. By that time you'll have a lot of songs to do that to :- )

Think of it this way - if you don't turn it down to their acceptable levels yourself - the streaming platforms will do it for you when they convert it to their format. Then you can't tell how its going to sound.

Going out on a limb here, I think I'm not alone in working to an ideal final output of -1dB peak. Then after that comes The Great Loudness Debate. That's different, but related conversation.

[James_AvA]

A bit of distortion will be subtle, it’s just the very peaks of the loudest transients that will get clipped at first. But it’s not a good way to work and you don’t need to work like that. Keep some headroom.

You need to look at true peak values, not just the sample peak values.

Can you pls tell me what is a sample peak value? When you say true peak values, are you referring to the parts of the song that do peak in the master track?

[James_AvA]

If you're not using a true-peak limiter anywhere in your chain I'd recommend you do. Even if you don't use it for any obvious compression, something that will take care of inter-sample peaks and give you a true peak reading is always useful.

[EDIT Wonks and I crossed in the ether]

I don't know what a true-peak limiter is. The only limiter I know is the one that increases or decreases the overall volume of the track. Is the mv meter an example of a true-peak limiter?

[Wonks]

Standard peak meters show the highest recorded sample value within a given short time frame (though the very highest value recorded is often displayed as a numeric value).

But the Digital to Analogue Converter will reconstruct the original waveform, which means that even though the recorded peak value might be say -0.3dBFS, if the previous values were -20dBFS and -9dBFS, and the ones after -6dBFS and -11dBFS, you are probably looking at a sharp transient with a peak in-between the highest samples that’s over 0dBFS. Whilst the display in the DAW looks fine, the DAC will clip the top of the output waveform.

So to avoid this happening, you need a ‘true peak’ meter, which duplicates in software what the DAC does, and will give you the highest value of the reconstructed waveform, which on big transients, could be 3dB, or more over the peak sample value on big transients.

If you are mixing and leave plenty of headroom on the master bus, then you can do without a true peak meter. But if you are pushing your mix to be very close to 0dBFS, then you certainly need one to avoid the output clipping when played back.

[Wonks]

This video may help you to understand what’s going on. https://youtu.be/cD7YFUYLpDc

[RichardT]

If you're not using a true-peak limiter anywhere in your chain I'd recommend you do. Even if you don't use it for any obvious compression, something that will take care of inter-sample peaks and give you a true peak reading is always useful.

[EDIT Wonks and I crossed in the ether]

I don't know what a true-peak limiter is. The only limiter I know is the one that increases or decreases the overall volume of the track. Is the mv meter an example of a true-peak limiter?

When sound is converted into digital form, it is measured 44,100 times a second (or more!). Those measurements are called samples and they are essentially what make up digital audio.

The sample peak is the highest sample value over a period of time, for example over the length of a track.

However, the samples, because they have gaps of 1/44100th of a second between them, can sometimes not register the highest value in the original sound.

But when a digital to analogue converter is fed the samples, it is able to reconstruct the original waveform properly from the samples (this seems almost magical, but it’s true). So the peak of the analogue signal it creates can be higher than any of samples. This is the ‘true peak’.

True peak limiters manipulate the digital audio to ensure that when it’s converted to analogue it will never exceed 0dBFS (the onset of clipping) even at the true peaks.

[James_AvA]

Hello to everybody. So, just recently, I exported the song and then put it back into garage-band, as a single track, in order to work on the mastering. What happened was, now that it is one track, it is not clipping, at all, it doesn't go into the red area, where as during the mixing, it was, that goes for the tracks and the master track. I also cannot hear any distortion. Pls advise. I'll take it as a good sign, the fact that there is no clipping evident now.

[amanise]

I'm certainly no mastering expert - but I usually know what I'm trying to achieve when I take off my mixing hat and (try) and put on my 'mastering' hat. It's a very different process requiring specialist skills IMO. It usually requires different tools to mixing - but maybe GarageBand had a mastering 'section' - I don't know. I use ACID Pro 10 for my recording, arranging, mixing etc. Then When I've finished that phase and am happy I can't get the mix any better - I export out to iZotope for my version of mastering on the final stereo mix.

When I do that - I always start from a point where I absolutely know what I want to achieve. So, what is that for you - with this track? Who is your target audience? Which platforms are you aiming for? Once you've decided that - you have a chance of being able to learn what you need to do to get to the final 'mastered' version. You'll also be able to target your questions more easily - its a big area. In my case, what I always want to do is - get out any noise, hum, rumble etc., get the loudness somewhere close to the threshold for Spotify, get normalisation at about -1 peak dBfs if it makes sense musically, make sure there's no clipping, make sure there's not too much of the high frequencies (that's just something that my mixes mostly tend to need controlling for some reason). Like that. But it'll be different for you.

[sc1460]

Hello to everybody. So, just recently, I exported the song and then put it back into garage-band, as a single track, in order to work on the mastering. What happened was, now that it is one track, it is not clipping, at all, it doesn't go into the red area, where as during the mixing, it was, that goes for the tracks and the master track. I also cannot hear any distortion. Pls advise. I'll take it as a good sign, the fact that there is no clipping evident now.

Well Joe Meek said if it sounds good, it is good, allegedly! Many producers always check their track against a “reference track”, play one that you think sounds like the sort of sound and level you want and compare your track to it in terms of level, tonal balance, harmonics etc. What does the comparison imply about your track?

Cheers
H