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spider-j
Registered: Oct 2004
Posts: 446 |
SID recordings – opinions on normalizing?
This isn't really aimed at composers but more on people who do real SID recordings:
What is your opinion on "normalizing" (or even more post processing) of SID recordings?
I usually record my music collections in one go and choose the input volume by the "loudest" song. When I later export those to individual files I'm always asking myself if I should normalize them all to -0.2 db or not. I'm unsure if it will destroy the "natural" feeling when you then again listen to the tunes in an MP3 playlist or similar.
In recording "normal" / acoustic music over the years it was never a question to normalize and even compress the heck out of everything. But just because "everyone does it" and sometimes it is even necessary to simulate the energy of a raw live rock sound when beeing in a recording / studio environment.
With SID it seems different. Even the tunes that have lower peaks already sound great. The "mixing" and in parts even "mastering" has already been done by the SID musician himself.
I would be interested in how others approach this subject. Do you normalize or even compress SID? Do you use even more post processing like EQ / reverb etc.? And if: why? And to what extend?
Cheers,
spider. |
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vincenzo
Registered: Sep 2003
Posts: 78 |
Quoting KrillI meant, it's still a thing while AAC and other more modern psycho-acoustic encodings allowing for better perceived quality at equal bitrates exist? =)
Well, what do you expect? People listen to music on everything that has a speaker. It's not really a common knowledge to "how to listen to" music and quality doesn't make a difference, musicality and easy/memorable melodies do. Most people don't listen to music because of quality but because of background music. Not to mention that in video gaming, especially on mobile games everyone plays with muted audio :) So without getting deeper into desperate thoughts about audio as an audio person :) I'm just saying that MP3 will be still a thing and nobody will care if it's lossy.
Percentage of people who care about audio quality is pretty low. We do care, we are the minority.
On a sidenote:
Personally, I don't understand the existence of FLAC. I don't see a reason for storing audio in FLAC that is similar sized to WAV, and it also requires more CPU for decompression (which is basically 0 spike on nowadays CPU's, but still).
Highest bitrate in any lossy compression will do the job for the average listener and well, to be honest I don't hear above 13k anyway and still make a living of working in game audio :) Shame on me, I know. |
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spider-j
Registered: Oct 2004
Posts: 446 |
Quoting vincenzoPersonally, I don't understand the existence of FLAC. I don't see a reason for storing audio in FLAC that is similar sized to WAV, and it also requires more CPU for decompression (which is basically 0 spike on nowadays CPU's, but still).
Highest bitrate in any lossy compression will do the job for the average listener and well, to be honest I don't hear above 13k anyway and still make a living of working in game audio :) Shame on me, I know.
Although I do use FLAC I must admit: It's mostly only "in my head". I use FLAC especially for archiving my own recordings and for backups of CDs that I bought. For some reason I have this feeling: well I paid for lossless back then and I want to keep it lossless. But nowadays when I buy music on bandcamp I just download the MP3 :-)
Oh: and AAC is also lossy. I guess Krill meant that it is a "better" codec (?!?) – don't know for sure. I think MP3 is still a "thing" and will be, because people are used to it since $forever and don't see the need to switch because of the reasons you mentioned. |
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ws
Registered: Apr 2012
Posts: 228 |
@krill
mp3 at 320kbps is as far as i am in contact with commercial audio (for example bandcamp) still very much a thing. The clipping problem concerns all lossy compressions - which can even just pop up unbeknownst to you in your listening chain as a wireless transmission codec.
"The 0.3 dB headroom is left at the top, because some oversampling DA converters do not perform very well at full-scale levels. They sometimes make distortion from arithmetic overflow."
In conversation with a few fellow audio engineers and when it comes to mastering (for a physical release for example) -0.3 db is -to my knowledge- the defacto standard upper amplitude limit for "zero clipping problems".
While yes, ofcourse there are the bold and the brave who go for -0.2 and even -0.1 db -- nobody forbids this.
And if you go PCM release, sure, why not 0 db. Most probably you won't even hear the clipping, or notice the clipping indicator on your gear. But if you want to hand out high quality audio in a form that is fit to be converted to almost any other format and is safe for any DAC, for me, -0.3 is the value where i will have no complaints or difficulties in any forseeable future use.
On the other hand, if you prepare audio for youtube releases, for instance, it makes no difference anyways, since they (and also others) heavily process the audio in an undisclosed way. |
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ws
Registered: Apr 2012
Posts: 228 |
And a word on FLAC, i also like it very much, it really helps for example reducing massive file size for multi-track production when it comes to dialogue editing.
There is an oddity, though: it seems that for example the FLAC decoder in Winamp (which still exists, yes) doesnt decode the audio very well. There are quite some "rounding errors", as i have noticed some months ago. I know that i get 1:1 decoding in my DAW or my Editing Software, but there seem to be some suboptimal decoding libraries floating around. |
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Krill
Registered: Apr 2002
Posts: 2850 |
Quoting spider-jI think MP3 is still a "thing" and will be, because people are used to it since $forever and don't see the need to switch The choice is mostly up to the content providers, no?
Most consumer devices should eat AAC just as well as MP3.
Quoting ws"The 0.3 dB headroom is left at the top, because some oversampling DA converters do not perform very well at full-scale levels. They sometimes make distortion from arithmetic overflow."
Yes, so pretty much the thing i suspected.
It's just how oversampling works (not a problem of the DA not performing well) - and you can oversample yourself (to 96 KHz, e.g.), then find out the headroom you need to leave for your specific recording.
But... this would be a bit of a cult in general, i guess. =) |
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spider-j
Registered: Oct 2004
Posts: 446 |
Quoting KrillThe choice is mostly up to the content providers, no?
Yes. I don't even know if anything besides Amazon and Bandcamp exists where you can still "buy" music. And on both default to MP3. Bandcamp offers also other formats, but this site in general is the digital equivalent to that record store where only musicians and die hard fans hang out.
Every "normie" only uses Spotify anyway and I must admit I don't even know what they are streaming. May even be AAC *shrug* |
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vincenzo
Registered: Sep 2003
Posts: 78 |
Quoting spider-jQuoting KrillThe choice is mostly up to the content providers, no?
Yes. I don't even know if anything besides Amazon and Bandcamp exists where you can still "buy" music. And on both default to MP3. Bandcamp offers also other formats, but this site in general is the digital equivalent to that record store where only musicians and die hard fans hang out.
Every "normie" only uses Spotify anyway and I must admit I don't even know what they are streaming. May even be AAC *shrug*
I believe https://www.discogs.com still sells physical copies and there's a renaissance of vinyl (again). People sometimes send a query about my music being available on vinyl, which, to be honest is a nice collector's thing but doesn't really worth the investment from my point of view.
Re. lossy compressions, I prefer using OGG over MP3! :) |
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acrouzet
Registered: May 2020
Posts: 80 |
I don't add any effects other than normalizing and adding fade-ins and fade-outs for my videos of SID tunes. Normalizing doesn't effect the volume or frequency relationships of the signal, so the resulting information that enters your ears is the exact same as if you listened to the raw SID output and increased the volume on the amp the signal's passing through.
I tend not to like any other post-processing on hardware chiptunes in general, since in my head it provides a "dishonest" representation of the sound hardware, and if you're doing it to a tune you didn't compose, it may go against how the composer intended the tune to sound like. |
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spider-j
Registered: Oct 2004
Posts: 446 |
Quoting acrouzetand if you're doing it to a tune you didn't compose, it may go against how the composer intended the tune to sound like.
That is an interesting take. As I come from a plain acoustic music background there it is quite "normal" that audio engineers do those decisions and *not* the composers there. Mixing and mastering is an art form itself in that domain and the results are of course discussed in a good relationship between artists and engineers but I think there is a huge tendency to "trust" your enigneers choices as an artist*.
SID music is a bit different. There is no such thing as "Mixing" that an audio engineer would do. Mixing is completely in the hand of the artist – it's part of the process to create a tune. And only "Mastering" will eventually be applied by someone else if that SID is recorded. And yes: that could be perceived as more "intrusive" than in the acoustic domain, because one is just not "used to" someone else fiddeling with their sounds.
That is one of the key points why I started this discussion here and I thank you very much for sharing your thoughts on that matter.
EDIT: * in fact the one best sounding album of my whole "career" as a musician was the one where a friend of mine didn't take any hints / infos / ideas from me at all and just did the complete mixing and mastering process alone and kept me at a distance. At first I was shocked because he did things I would not have approved in the first place. But as time went on I noticed that engineers listening to me as an artist was probably the cause for every thing before not sounding really "good" in the long run. In retrospective I have to admit: that is the best sounding album I ever released and I (as the composer and main performer) had nothing to do with how it was mixed and mastered. |
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acrouzet
Registered: May 2020
Posts: 80 |
Quote: Quoting acrouzetand if you're doing it to a tune you didn't compose, it may go against how the composer intended the tune to sound like.
That is an interesting take. As I come from a plain acoustic music background there it is quite "normal" that audio engineers do those decisions and *not* the composers there. Mixing and mastering is an art form itself in that domain and the results are of course discussed in a good relationship between artists and engineers but I think there is a huge tendency to "trust" your enigneers choices as an artist*.
SID music is a bit different. There is no such thing as "Mixing" that an audio engineer would do. Mixing is completely in the hand of the artist – it's part of the process to create a tune. And only "Mastering" will eventually be applied by someone else if that SID is recorded. And yes: that could be perceived as more "intrusive" than in the acoustic domain, because one is just not "used to" someone else fiddeling with their sounds.
That is one of the key points why I started this discussion here and I thank you very much for sharing your thoughts on that matter.
EDIT: * in fact the one best sounding album of my whole "career" as a musician was the one where a friend of mine didn't take any hints / infos / ideas from me at all and just did the complete mixing and mastering process alone and kept me at a distance. At first I was shocked because he did things I would not have approved in the first place. But as time went on I noticed that engineers listening to me as an artist was probably the cause for every thing before not sounding really "good" in the long run. In retrospective I have to admit: that is the best sounding album I ever released and I (as the composer and main performer) had nothing to do with how it was mixed and mastered.
Ah yeah, it really depends on what/who you're composing for. This varies even within chiptune itself. Generally in "western" chiptune, it's expected that the composer do everything themself. However, what's interesting is that in Japanese game studios it was common to separate composers and programmers. The composer wouldn't do any work with the computer/console. It was up to the programmer to port the composer's composition to the sound hardware, basically doing everything from instrument creation to mixing, and possibly even deciding what parts to omit to fit the composition into limited channels. In other words, the programmers were basically making covers. |
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