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Reading "compression" as both a programmer and audio-minded person made that first sentence difficult to parse at first. :) But yeah, it's obvious when I have
by muraiki 11y ago
Reading "compression" as both a programmer and audio-minded person made that first sentence difficult to parse at first. :)
But yeah, it's obvious when I have my car stereo nearly on max to listen to classical or jazz, and then if I turn the radio and get a pop music station my ears are about to explode.
- JonnieCache 11y agoDon't worry, the loudness war is basically over. itunes and youtube normalize everything to -15dbRMS and -13dbRMS respectively. Spotify uses the ReplayGain algorithm. Broadcasters worldwide now use the EBU R128 standard, which is a more effective form of loudness normalization, hopefully to be adopted by online services too at some point. All that's required is for personal media players to widely implement loudness normalization (by default) for preexisting records in peoples collections. http://productionadvice.co.uk/lufs-dbfs-rms/ http://productionadvice.co.uk/lufs-dbfs-rms/
- muraiki 11y agoYeah, I should have read the wikipedia article in full before commenting. I'm glad the war is over!
- hammock 11y agoThe normalization is song-by-song to my knowledge. It doesn't normalize the audio within the song itself. (Over)compression is a key part of the aesthetic of a lot of pop hits today, and while in the face of normalization you won't be able to make your song overall louder than the next, it won't necessarily stop you from creating a "wall of sound" waveform if that's the sound you're looking for.
- lmm 11y agoAbsolutely, and nor should it. But what it should mean is that if you make your song mostly quiet, your peaks will be louder than a wall of sound.
- baddox 11y ago> itunes and youtube normalize everything to -15dbRMS and -13dbRMS respectively. Are you using "normalize" in the audio production sense, as in adding or subtracting a constant gain to an entire track? I'm pretty sure that iTunes doesn't do this, at least not by default.
- Radle 11y agoWait, what does that mean for somehow who records music as a hobby? If my recording is all the time at around -10dbRMS, it will sound as loud to the listener as if it was on -15dbRMS(itunes)? Also, how exactly does it sound when most of my recording is at -10dbRMS and a couple peaks are at -5dbRMS?
- bitwize 11y agoIt's not just the acoustic properties of dynamic-compressed music. The compression forces music to be more simplistic, because there's less "room" for complexity. Michael Jackson's "Thriller" is a standard pop hit, engineered for chart performance and not artistic virtuosity, but it is still a rich, deep, satisfying piece of music to listen to in part because there's a whole lot of stuff going on. If you tried to cram that many instrument parts into a modern Katy Perry tune, it would clip like crazy and become unlistenable hash.
- muraiki 11y agoI mostly play acoustic instruments now, but I discovered what you were talking about when I used to make electronic music. I'd naively use some heavy compression for loudness, but as I added more parts things would get quite muddled. I'm no great audio engineer so maybe something else was the cause, but I'm pretty sure this was it.
- copperx 11y agoNo, compression doesn't force the music to be more simplistic. It enables simplistic music to sound fuller. Anyone that has mixed 120+ tracks for a single "modern rock" song with a compressor at the end would tell you so.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]