'Song Options' > Track Headroom = -6db by default ?!

Help, Support & Bugs Beginners Questions - Renoise
1

I’m sure long-time Renoise users are well aware of this already, but the default settings in Renoise, not in Prefs but in the Song > Options screen, is to have -6db of headroom for all tracks.

I’m just curious – are people here leaving that the way it is, or changing it to zero, the way it would be in nearly every other DAW ?

I only discovered this because I couldn’t figure out why a sample I was playing in Maschine sounded so much louder than the exact same sample triggered in Renoise. After much head-scratching and then a (belated) Google search, I did find that Renoise defaults to this -6db headroom. My other DAWs (Ableton and Maschine) don’t do this, so literally everything I use in those (samples, plugins, yes everything) will sound 6db louder than they sound in Renoise.

It seems to me that having this on (the default -6db setting) would drastically effect how one goes about mixing!

Are you guys leaving it at the default setting? If so, any further thoughts on why? It’s really a pretty drastic difference to have across the board for all tracks, compared to the default setup of every other DAW I’ve used…

it’s not a problem, obviously, because (once you know where the setting is) it can easily be changed… so mostly I’m just curious about whether people are working this way or not!

thanks,

-M

1 Like
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I leave it as it is. Even then I leave headroom.

When I’m done in Renoise I import the rendered wav into Reaper and do the final “make it louder but not crushed” stuff for the final version.

3

The -6db thing is somewhat annoying when trying to ‘bounce’ or ‘freeze’ a track. I tend to have my tracks fairly quiet and boost them up later anyway, but it’s also a bit annoying that there’s not much to see in my track scopes.

4

I sometimes disable it for sound design projects, where I would often want to copy/paste device chains between inst.fx and track/sends, and want to have consitent behaviour of distortions or dynamics plugins. For mixing the -6 seems just about right for optimizing the usable range of the channel level sliders. Then again it probably depends on how hot your instruments tend to be, this can be vastly different & should dictate the amount of headroom you would need.

5

I always song headroom +130 dB

Also in Default Song (save) I have +148 dB headroom