Hey guys,
I’ve been having trouble with adjusting the mastered volume (before and) mainly after I’ve rendered songs. Songs are simply coming out significantly softer than I want them to, after comparing them both to commercially produced songs and to the demo songs which come with Renoise. I’ve tried experimenting with automation of both the individual tracks and the master track and that helped very slightly, but not sufficiently. What could I be doing wrong?
Cheers!
Well, it’s not your fault. This is a feature of Renoise and it has been discussed and debated at length. I still don’t understand the reasoning for it well enough to explain. A 3dB (or is it 6dB) cut is made to rendered files so you have to account for that if you don’t want to do any post processing.
As he mentions the demo songs that come with Renoise he is clearly not referring to that.
Look up Compression, Limiter, Mastering and The Loudness War. Worth having a fair amount of dynamic range/breathing space with a mix down as it can give more for a mastering engineer to work with later.
since renoise automatically renders -6db below the level you hear (did i say that right?) try loading your rendered song as a sample. then normalize, compress or whatever sort of processing you want. use the little “save” button in the disk panel to save your new louder version of the rendered song to disk. hope that helps a little.
read up on the disk browser and how to save samples here
i used to use audacity for post processing before i figured the disk panel out…he he
It sounds like you might need to use some compression on the various elements in your song. Compression is quite a tricky subject, and it’s quite easy to make things worse by applying compression with incorrect settings. Ultimately, it’s something you’ll probably have to explore eventually, but it may take a while before you are totally comfortable using it.
In the meantime, a very quick and easy way to gain some loudness is to use a master limiter. I really like the Classic Master Limiter from Kjaerhus Audio’s Classic Series.
You can just drop this thing onto the master track in Renoise and instantly gain a few dB’s. It only has one parameter for the desired level of limiting, so it’s very easy to use. As you gradually lower the level, more and more limiting is applied (no audio is allowed to go above that level), and then the plugin finally normalises everything back to 0dB to give you a nice boost. If you push it too far it will distort, but if you stick to sensible levels then it can sound very transparent and nice.
Beware of using Audacity for normalisation – in my experience it normalises left and right channels independently, which is completely useless. This could of course be a glitch with the particular (Linux) version of Audacity I have installed, but it’s worth checking that this isn’t happening to you too.
Wow, thanks for the fast replies guys. Very helpful. I’ll definitely look into loading it as a sample and using compression (more).