Mastering: The Black Art

eustressor

@Tarekith said:
... these days I see just as many people mastering the tracks one at a time and just conpensating one at a time to give them the same vibe. As with anything music, there's more than one valid way to do things and a lot of it comes down to your preferred workflow.

Good to know. Mastering is sounding more and more like working in Photoshop - no one right way, several different methods to achieve same results, prepping production for specific media, generally accepted best practices vs. "looks (sounds) good to me!"

I've been a professional graphic designer as long as you've been mastering - care to trade skill sets for a week?

Tarekith

As a matter of fact I've been contemplating trading mastering for some graphic design to help update my website. Just haven't had the time to sit down and think about what I want yet!

MusicInclusive

Indeed - and agreed @Tarekith, although if people are doing their own agglomerate mastering for an album release, (which has the downside of course of not engaging a separate set of ears on the project! ), S1 provides that capability in a very nicely integrated manner.

The "holistic sonic overlord" tired ears issue can be slightly mitigated by leaving a project once one has finished mixing it and going back to it after some time (days, weeks, not hours!) without being tempted to try and remix while mastering. The nice thing about S1 is that if you then do find something that doesn't sit well in the mastered result, you can alter it dynamically in the original mix and it will automatically make it into the mastered project. It's one of S1's great benefits.

Tarekith

I'm surprised more DAWs haven't jumped on that idea after S1 implemented it, it's really well done. S1 is also one of the only major DAWs that can export DDP, another nice mastering benefit for the 3 people still making CDs

Tired ears. One of the most common bits of advice I give my mastering clients is take a couple days away from your song when you think you're done with the mix. Step away and don't listen to it at all, give yourself a chance to reset. It's amazing how obvious any remaining problems will be when you come back to it, assuming there are any problems of course.

But of course that late in the process people are all excited and just plow on through anyway LOL.

u0421793

Oh, just one quick question to the masters of mastering, listening here.

How do you approach mastering for youtube? Any considerations you could illuminate?

And in particular, have any of you ever involved yourself with audio for video that has more channels than the basic left and right of stereo as we currently know it? Has anyone successfully managed to do a stereo down mix plus surround mix in one youtube video, for example?

Tarekith

At the moment most of my clients are still using the regular digital masters when they upload to YouTube, and unlike Soundcloud it rarely seems to affect the audio quality in the HD modes. YouTube has been experimenting with Loudness Normalization ala Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora etc though. Basically means they measure the overall loudness via a measurement similar to LUFS, adjust the volume automatically. So songs that are totally squashed for volume normally wil play back the same overall loudness as those with more dynamics. In the long run this means we don't have to over-limit things anymore since they'll just get lowered in volume as a results. Ian Shepard explains it in more detail here:

http://productionadvice.co.uk/youtube-loudness/

Personally I don't work with multi-channel audio. I explored the possibility when I first went full-time 9 years ago, but the market was tiny and seems to have just gotten smaller since then. Sorry.

MusicInclusive

Yes - excellent link @Tarekith - I had just posted that on my FB page yesterday

Tarekith

Implementation still seems to be hit or miss, some countries see it working already, other's say it's on for a couple weeks then things go back to the way they were. I think Google is still fine-tuning, but overall very promising.

u0421793

@Tarekith said:
Implementation still seems to be hit or miss, some countries see it working already, other's say it's on for a couple weeks then things go back to the way they were. I think Google is still fine-tuning, but overall very promising.

I’m half wondering if it’s browser-dependent. It wouldn’t surprise me if it all tries to happen client-side first, and if it can’t, falls back to server side.

For example, when I experimented the year before last (in the approved youtube manner, as far as I could tell) it really depended on what the person viewing it was viewing it on (chrome vs rest of world, platforms, chromebook, internet tv boxes, etc). There were so many daft undocumented variables that people were guessing at — for example, people said things like having to explicitly select HD in the video to “activate” the appropriate sound channel selection or it would be just the basic uploaded down mix, but it all seemed a bit like superstition at the time. That was to do with stereo plus surround, but I could imagine the loudness level democratisation would also consist of a reprocessed cached layer that either is or isn’t sent. I’m wondering if google would ‘throw away’ the original audio to replace it with re-unlouded audio? If I were google I’d find a way of getting the browser to do it. I’d come up with a numerical quantity of adjustment for that video (perhaps a dynamic track — the video already has timing!) and send that to the browser to process. But then, so many browsers and devices.

Tarekith

I've been sort of paying attention to it, but like you said it's so random in the implementation that whatever variables are driving it right now make it just guess work. Until it's totally cross platform and worldwide, I think we're still going to be using the "typical" digital masters and not more dynamic ones conforming to LUFS -16 (or whatever stadard YouTube uses).

[Deleted User]

@Tarekith said:
LUFS -16 (or whatever stadard YouTube uses).

Hm, interesting
If it frees us from the over compressed mess that is en vogue these days I am all for it.
Lol, if it turns the volume down on the fat sausage maybe we will be hearing more healthy breathing music again.

Tarekith

That's the hope, but I don't expect it to be happening for some time still. As long as DJs buy hyper compressed music, electronic stuff will continue to be squashed. What we really need is software like Traktor, stores like Beatport, and things like Pioneer CDJs to support something like this. Fat chance

u0421793

@Tarekith said:
That's the hope, but I don't expect it to be happening for some time still. As long as DJs buy hyper compressed music, electronic stuff will continue to be squashed. What we really need is software like Traktor, stores like Beatport, and things like Pioneer CDJs to support something like this. Fat chance

I grunted in agreement to you a few days ago and left this thread there. DJs and discos need to play sound louder than the crowds of dancing youths enjoying themselves spending their money. But then I thought — silent discos! It’s a thing. Of course, I’ve never been to one, (or been out for the past 18 years) but for a silent disco, you wouldn’t want tiring compressed audio, you’d actually want dynamic music. Dynamic dance music.