about the Master Track

[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