Reduce peaks vs reduce loud parts?

[elderberries]

Can anyone give me an idea as to which of these compression options is better for evening out dynamics without distorting the sound?

Thanks in advance!

[piano nick]

Elderberries:

Good question - the only advice I can offer is to try both with different settings and listen to the results.

Post edited @ 12:10 Pacific Time:

You might try these sites for some guidance:

http://www.recordingwebsite.com/rwtip/a ... rw34r.html

http://www.recordingwebsite.com/rwtip/archive/rw68.html

http://www.recordingproject.com/article ... e=6&page=1

http://www.bluebearsound.com/articles/mixing101.htm

http://www.alexandermagazine.com/record ... 4/bass.htm

http://www.digitalprosound.com/2002/03_ ... cerpt1.htm



PN

[elderberries]

I will take a look, thank you very much.

[Bob Jones]

I will take a look, thank you very much.

Elderberries, get back to us and share what you've learned. I'd like some help with compression settings, too. I'm sure this will be a very popular topic.

Piano Nick, thanks for the links. I'll check them out as well.

[piano nick]

Bob and Elder B:

Compression is a much debated topic. I'm not sure if I referenced a site where an expert makes a good case that too much compression is used on commercially produced music these days. No, I just looked and it isn't there. Here's the site:

http://www.prorec.com/prorec/articles.n ... 2E005DAF1C

I have ripped about ten cd's onto my hard drive using Goldwave, and then "pulled the wave file up" into GW. Some waves seem to "bounce" off the limits for the whole song, and when you do a scan for "Maximize", the values will be at or near zero. This usually applies to recording done in the past few years. On older stuff (September of My Years - 1965 - by Frank Sinatra) the waveform is very different. The amplitude (volume) varies considerably. And this cd was re-mastered a few years ago from the original LP vinyl.

If you have some commercially produced cd's, this exercize is a real eye opener and you will learn a lot.

What is produced on a commercial cd depends on the mastering engineer and what his bosses want to hear. These days it seems, everything has to be "punchy". But as Rip Rowan says, punchy gets very tiresome very quickly.

It is pretty well understood that some compression is desirable, but how much will vary with the type of music. Classical should not be compressed much because it is the composer's and conductor's intention to have extreme high and low volumes, particularly in an orchestral piece. Hip-hop will be very different.

Also some instruments tend to have wide dynamic ranges - the piano is typical. If it was compressed and worked over so all the notes had the same volume, it would be unbearable.

The only good advice I have heard is LISTEN, LISTEN, and then when your ears are fresh, go back and LISTEN some more.

If you are mastering a tune with high quality headphones, when the song is played on a car stereo, the sound may be very disappointing - I learned this the hard way.

I'm realizing that compression is an art and every song needs a different approach.

PN

[AussieTom]

Thanks for the tips installing the latest version of MySQL on a Server on a Windows 11
In my wildest dreams I'd never ever contemplated using MySQL reduce peaks or reduce loud parts
It can be done
In Goldwave, save your waveform as type: Numerical Text, Attributes ASCII 24 bit integer, stereo
Then open MySQL and from there open your Numerical TXT file
manipulate the text file values to emaulate various compression algorithms and peak detection, YRMV
Then save that text file still as TXT
Then open GW and open that text file and see if the result meets your needs
Then in GW, save the file in any standard format .MP3, .WAV, .XAC, .AIFF, .AIFC, .IFF, .AU, .VOC, SND, .SDS, .SMP, .VOX, .MAT, .TXT, M4A, .FLAC, .OGG, OPUS, .WMA

If you're not in a hurry, it can be done in a similar way using MSExcel and Excel VBA visual studio, RP Pico microcontroller + Python, ATTiny85 ucontroller, Fortran Pascal etc