Hot answers tagged compression
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There are two questions here that I think should be addressed separately:
Question 1: "is this a bad method of practice?"
As I understand it, the reason it's considered "better" to compress individual tracks and not the master bus is because you have a finer degree of control, especially in today's digital world where you could instance a compressor on ...
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Yes, it's possible. What you need to do is demux and remux. Check out free tools like VirtualDub and Any Video Converter to split the original into separate streams, add what you want using Audacity or similar, then re-multiplex them together using a tool like AviMux. The video can remain unchanged.
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You should use an expander when an outright gate will sound really unnatural (and that is not the desire). For example, if your vocalist has a really distracting breathing sound when idle, an expander will reduce that without completely eliminating the attendant ambiance that makes a track sound coherent (which is why it's important to record a minute or ...
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There are a few scenarios that spring immediately to mind:
If the overtones (or fundamenals, really) of your guitar or bass are in the same range as a vocalist, you can use the vocal signal as the sidechain input, "ducking" those instruments out of the way during vocal passages. I tend to think this works better for more rhythmic vocals, although I don't ...
6
The only ubiquitous one is mp3. AAC is great on Apple products, but only mp3 works on everything.
When storing voice audio you can go for a very low quality, and potentially use mono if you don't require stereo. This will give you very high compression - approaching that of speex.
From the Wikipedia comparison page
Bit Rate:
mp3 8 to 320 kbit/s
speex ...
6
Ah, the old question: How do I make the vocals heard over a band with a tiny PA? It's not always easy.
Compression won't help you; it may actually make things worse by making feedback more likely. It sounds like you're using underpowered PAs, and if you want the vocals to be loud enough you'll need the band to play more quietly. But the band has to want to ...
5
What you are missing is that not every frame is stored as a picture. A large number of frames are stored simply by keeping track of what changed from the previous picture. If you think about most video, not a whole lot is actually changing since the majority of the scene stays the same or moves in a similar pattern. By describing only the changes, the ...
4
The recommended order of operations is as follows.
(If needed) Noise reduction.
(Most people don't do this) Normalization/compression/gating on individual tracks.
Apply Levelator to mixed output, before any music is added.
Add music, convert to MP3.
Step #2 is generally not needed because The Levelator does all those things for you. But if you really ...
4
It's just how bit rate is defined. It's "bits of data per second". So if you compress something, even losslessly, it's at a lower bitrate.
The association between "low bitrate" and "low quality" comes from lossy codecs like MP3, which let you trade off quality for file size. Lossless codecs like FLAC instead let you trade off CPU time (at least during ...
4
It's common and good practice to mix the drums to a group track, in pretty much any situation; that group track might well have a compressor (possibly even multiband) on it, but I still wouldn't call this mastering. Unless you're limited by CPU performance, it's not useful to bounce that group track to a fixed file; just leave the group track as it is so you ...
4
On mixing drums down,
The top pro:
Once your drum mix is right you don't need to worry about individual levels - it is just done
The main con:
A particular song might require pulling out some tones from a particular drum to give some headroom to another instrument, but your only alternative is to use an equaliser
We tend to mix down prior to a live ...
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The short answer is "No." DVD by definition is limited to 720x480 video with a fairly low bitrate, compressed specifically with MPEG-2. There is absolutely no way to make your HD video look just as good with those constraints.
Some DVD players do let you play .mp4, .mkv, or whatever files that happen to be stored on a DVD, but that isn't a standard ...
4
A compressor would be an ideal use for an insert. An insert is both the input and the output.
They use a TRS (tip-ring-sleeve) connector. The tip, for instance, will be the send, and the ring would be the return. The mixer usually labels the insert so you know which is input and which is output.
You'd use a 'Y' cable. The bottom of the 'Y' is TRS. ...
4
Neil Fein wrote a great post about what you can do, but another thing to consider is to make sure you talk with the sound guy about how you want it to sound. If there is a dedicated engineer there and it is a smaller venue, chances are good that they aren't very good and may be used to the "living room experience" ie, crank the bass and the guitars and ...
3
Normalization is the process of both making the loudest peak 0 dB and making all the tracks the same volume.
Compression means that you lower the peaks to get a more consistant volume so you can make it louder to get the highest peak at 0 dB.
Well, you can't really go over 0 dB. At infinity dB the speaker is in the middle. At 0 dB the speaker is at the far ...
3
Your pre-amp should be plenty good. You should be able to use a compressor in-the-box. Compressing while tracking could be beneficial, but not strictly necessary. Unless you can articulate exactly why you would need an out-board compressor, chances are you actually don't. Most live venues will have compressors so there's no need to get your own in most ...
3
When you encode a WAV file to an MP3, some information is irretrievably lost. When you decode the MP3 back to a WAV file, the decoder recreates something close to the original waveform, but not exact due to the lost information. When you re-encode the WAV file back to MP3 once again information is lost. The second MP3 file is of lesser quality than the ...
3
As with many things, it's a tradeoff.
On the one hand, doing everything in post offers the most flexibility - you can compress and gate after the fact, and if you don't like the result you can change the settings around and try again without having to re-record. You can also cherry-pick individual regions to process differently if you like.
On the other ...
3
Since FLAC by definition is lossless compression there shouldn't be any data loss unless there is an error during encoding.
In my experience, when you compress a WAV file to FLAC it reduces the size by about 1/3. (The FLAC web site claims even better compression, and as @Mulvya pointed out in the comments, this is due to the content of the recording). The ...
3
You may find a lot of subjective answers here, and some of the quality seems to be dependent on what you play the files on - for example AAC and low quality mp3s will be fine on your iPod through headphones, but pop them on a decent system with good speakers and they will sound crap (Skeptics question here)
Each of the lossy formats has its own way of ...
3
Have you tried simply pulling the threshold right down on the Ozone Loudness Maximiser? See my recent answer on loudness wars though for why this might not be a good idea.
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Unacceptable is in the eye of the watcher, so that part is tough to answer.
Distinguishable is easier: yes, there will be a difference. It will not be obvious in every frame or circumstance, but it will be there. If you simply truncate the lowest bit, it will raise the noise floor and the effect will be most evident in low light areas. So, it will look ...
3
The key is to dial in the bitrate - you'll need about 800kbps video with 100kbps audio to hit 200MB. That's low for for SD resolution, but it might be good enough for you. Also look for software that has an option for 2-pass encoding.
Try Expression Encoder, Adobe Media Encoder, or Sorenson Squeeze.
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I am assuming by "lowgain attack" you mean "slow attack." A slow attack time, allows the original transient to come through before engaging the compression circuit. You want a fairly strong compression with medium to slow attack time, with a pretty fast release. Timing the release will be key. If the compressor doesn't release before the next note, you will ...
2
If you have a bass line that is closely (or exactly) mirroring the kick drum, triggering the bass compression with the much sharper attack of the kick can tighten up the line. Even if you push it to the point where it sounds unnatural, it can still be very musical.
For both guitar and bass, it's fun to trigger a gate with a different signal. The last time I ...
2
If you're looking to create dynamically interesting music then you should go easy on the compression. Compression can give a kind of 'warmth' by making everything sound bigger and bringing out the bass.
I've over compressed everything in the past trying to keep up with the 'pros' and I just can't do it like they do. It makes my ears hurt. And even the ...
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Both plugins are not very well-suited for mastering, I'm afraid. Tube-style saturation/overdrive is great for single input signals because its asymmetric clipping adds not just odd harmonics but also warmer-sounding even ones; but in the mix you will already have plenty of both and these asymmetric characteristics are rather a drawback when you want a tight ...
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A good place to look for this type of info is Hydrogenaudio. But... because this is so subjective (quality) it ultimately comes down to doing some listening tests yourself.
As a purely pragmatic thing, I'd use .mp3 for lossy compression as it's established itself as the gold standard for better or worse.
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A hardware compressor/limiter, when setup correctly, will prevent your signal from overloading your audio interface and distorting. This is very different from creative compression to change the loudness of the signal.
If you are recording at 24bit, then you may be able to record such that you never peak close to 0 dB. But if you do cross 0, you will get ...
2
A single layer DVD has about 4.5 GB of capacity, a dual layer DVD has about 8.5 GB of capacity. Some of this space is taken up by menus and special features, but that still leaves plenty of room for video with minimal compression.
Take a look at the "blocky" videos - they have probably been re-compressed down to 700MB (so they can fit on a CD-R blank) or ...
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