Hi guys can anyone tell me why despite the sample editor showing this professionally mastered house track as completely clipped and maxed out is not actually pushing in to the red when played on renouse with everything set to 0db?
I’m getting in to mastering more seriously atm and this is really bugging me as renoise seems to pushing us towards an unrealistically quiet (by 2024 standards) volume for our tracks. Not looking for a loudness wars discussion but any insights are appreciated, is renoise even the right tool for analysing tracks like this?
Yes I changed it to 0db in the song settings. The crazy thing is that this track is one of the more quiet ones in my collection registering on a Loudness meter at around -10 LUFS peak.
Surely a waveform like this should be pushing renoise to clip with everything set to 0db?
I do have a loudness meter as I say to as a separate analytical tool but it is off-putting to see clipped wave forms when the reality is they aren’t. Hope that makes it clearer and thanks for the replies.
Track is in 24 bits. DAW is in 32 bit floating point. This gives Renoise way more headroom to play the file without peaking red.
Correct me if I’m wrong.
Be sure to disable the headroom feature too (you already did, though).
Suggestion:
Use Reaper. It has countless scripts to help mastering.
I do all my master works there. I calculate loudness, generate graphs, normalize stuff pre-fader, etc… It also has a monitoring channel in which you place FX that can only be heard inside the DAW but are not in the rendered audio (such as calibration VST, loudness analysers etc).
Thanks for the informative reply. I do have a paid copy of Reaper but mainly work in Renoise and Live. What you are saying about the analysis options sound perfect for mastering so maybe I need to start putting some hours in to it.
As I said before though, youlean loudness meter is showing the track as coming in at quite a bit lower than 0db and the track isn’t particularly over compressed for a house track. Even if this is a result of bit depth would it not be better in a practical sense for it to display a wider volume range to reflect how producers are mixing these days?
Do you notice any difference in the LUFS metering inside and outside Renoise? I personally never did.
On a side note, the peak measurement matters a lot less when comparing loudness. As long as the LUFS range is similar in different measurements (inside Renoise and in other DAWs), there’s no problem in the peak difference. I keep my peaks at -1db, for instance, and about -9 LUFS-I. When comparing different tracks I never care much about the peaks, only the integrated loudness. In short, peak doesn’t make much difference if they sit at the same LUFS range!
I don’t notice any difference at all and actually in renoise even though the visual is showing what should be a massively clipped awful sounding waveform, my ears are hearing the opposite and I’d really like to understand this better.
I think you are touching on perceived loudness there which agree is the best way of analysing tracks in an objective way when we don’t have a full range speaker system to test them on. The peak is still an important measurement in itself, just not as useful musically perhaps. The conclusion that I’m coming to is that there is better software out there for the job I want to do, that tutorial you shared is really helpful too. I think Reaper will become where I add the final touches to tracks from now on.
Looking at the same waveform in Reaper you can actually see that there’s a bit of headroom on the track, not very much though! it’s been compressed to the limit clearly but the mastering engineer did a great job cos it still sounds awesome
Yep, peak is still important to a certain extent. You’ll most likely be clipping to 0db somewhere in the master chain (probably right before the limiter), even if you render at -1db, for instance, to ensure there’s no audible distortion when converting to lossy formats and to alleviate the load of the limiter(s).
By the way, I highly recommend the following channel. They have excellent tutorials and analysis on mastering, using Reaper!
Renoise is perfectly capable for mastering, but it’s definitely not intended for it. It’s possible, but not optimal. Some people do it and can make it sound great, but it’s just not for me. My workflow consists of producing+mixing in Renoise and then mastering in Reaper!
I like breaking up my work flow too, I think it can help bring a fresh perspective at times. I’ll definitely be posting more as I run in to more issues and conundrums haha.
