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Why Music Really Is Getting Louder
Teksty Piosenek writes "Artists and record bosses believe that the best album is the loudest one. Sound levels are being artificially enhanced so that the music punches through when it competes against background noise in pubs or cars. 'Geoff Emerick, engineer on the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album, said: "A lot of what is released today is basically a scrunched-up mess. Whole layers of sound are missing. It is because record companies don't trust the listener to decide themselves if they want to turn the volume up." Downloading has exacerbated the effect. Songs are compressed once again into digital files before being sold on iTunes and similar sites. The reduction in quality is so marked that EMI has introduced higher-quality digital tracks, albeit at a premium price, in response to consumer demand.'"
You are too old!
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
VideoSift mentions an one minute and 52 seconds YouTube video showing big-name Compact Discs (CDs) [and other audio sources] manufacturers are distorting sounds to make them seem louder. At the same time, sound quality suffers.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
P.P.S. I'm doing Science and I'm still alive.
From all that loud music.
but if the music keeps selling, the labels are providing exactly what the cloth-eared idiot masses want, and in the end they're out to make a profit, not "quality music."
This video explains the effects of audio compression quite clearly, albeit the sound quality is only what YouTube can allow.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ
cheers.
Is it just me, or does that article (intentionally?) confuse the two meanings "compression" can have with regards to digital audio? The loudness bit is audio compression: reducing dynamic range (which they do talk about). Then, they bring in the bit about data compression and the EMI iTunes Plus downloads, which is entirely different (admittedly, it also introduces artifacts, but of a completely different nature). The bit about the Los Lonely Boys album "compression-free" could easily be free of either (or both!) kinds of compression.
While the logical part of me chalks it up to confusing terminology being misunderstood, part of me wonders if those meanings are being intentionally conflated to make the article more impactful... it would sound less impressive if EMI wasn't "admitting there is a problem with compression"
I recognize people by their sigs. Is that a bad thing?
between file compression (mp3 / ogg / whatever) and compression as used by sound engineer. It will basically make the music have more of 'punchy' feeling. Google for loudness race - 'carefully' listen to a current top-ten pop song and you will easily notice how crappy it actually is.
If you try mixing music and spend a lot of time doing it on many different styles, you'll notice that still quite a few pop albums are mastered without inducing clipping. I've mostly noticed this in Japanese pop though, so what I'm saying may not apply to what's being told in the article.
Kind of reminds me of the banner ad obnoxiousness arms race. The flashing red-to-black-to-yellow ones drove me crackers. I downloaded Mozilla just to block that kind of crap. The rotting toenail cream ad was also a doozy.
Table-ized A.I.
The problem is that todays speakers go up to eleven. That one louder...
:(){
They want their news back sans EMI item
Now for my karma beating...
This was brought to you buy the Department of Redundancy Department
We always called it "peaking", and it's something that everyone who's recorded an album in the spare bedroom of their band mate's house can attest to - if you record with fewer peaks (places where the sound wave maxes out at the top of the available volume area), it sounds better. It just plain sounds better.
But, take songs off that CD and slam them onto a mix-tape style rotation or an iPod, and you'll be reaching to turn up the volume every time your song comes on.
From what I can tell, recording engineers are responding to the bands who don't want people to have to turn the music up (in particular record execs). It's one of those terrible problems - if everyone would agree on such-and-such date to back off the recording volume and get less peaks (say, no more than 7 per album), everyone's music would instantly sound better. But the fact that everyone's competing, and you don't want your copycat pop punk band to be the quiet one, means it's a self perpetuating problem.
~X
sig?
Here's a great audio and visual (narrated) example of the "loudness wars" and the way that reduction in dynamic range reduces the quality of the recorded sound. Keep in mind, this isn't audiophile mumbo-jumbo... this is a very real and very unfortunate trend in what the engineers who master albums (specifically pop albums) are required to do to keep their albums "competitive" with all the other loud albums.
Couldn't we just add a tag to every track with a floating point number by which to multiply the magnitude of all the samples in that track by default.
That way the track could be recorded with it's full dynamic range preserved, so people who care about dynamic range can hear it clearly. And as the loudness war progresses that one multiplier could just be incremented, so that people who don't care about dynamic range will hear the track loudly.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
It's an interesting fact, but one that people on usenet groups frequented by aesthetically-minded audio engineers have been talking about for years. The earlier post in this thread shows some pictures of the sound that are interesting.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
Dynamic range compression is wrecking today's music, but the summary seems to have gotten it mixed up with lossy audio compression, which entails encoding, say, an MP3 or AAC file from uncompressed data (typically a CD). The word "compression" in the context of audio can refer to either of these unrelated processes.
s sion_(audio)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_data_compressio n
See the Wikipedia articles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compre
I've come to the opinion that modern vinyl records often sound in some respects better than their digital versions - even though vinyl is an inferior medium, today's records presumably aren't "engineered to death" like the CDs and MP3s that are the subject of this article; radio stations don't play records any more, so the same pressures that factor into the digital masters don't apply.
Of course, this could be entirely in my head. I don't really know anything about the mastering process. Can any audio engineers out there confirm or deny this?
Long live earphones
Nigel Tufnel: The numbers all go to eleven. Look, right across the board, eleven, eleven, eleven and... Marty DiBergi: Oh, I see. And most amps go up to ten? Nigel Tufnel: Exactly. Marty DiBergi: Does that mean it's louder? Is it any louder? Nigel Tufnel: Well, it's one louder, isn't it? It's not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where? Marty DiBergi: I don't know. Nigel Tufnel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do? Marty DiBergi: Put it up to eleven. Nigel Tufnel: Eleven. Exactly. One louder. Marty DiBergi: Why don't you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number and make that a little louder? Nigel Tufnel: [pause] These go to eleven.
Yeah, my karma sucks....but so do the mods.
It's involves all audio devices in general, although it could have to do with unintentional design specifications.
More often than not, I find that I need to set the Windows master volume to an extremely low level - one or two pixels above silence. After that, I need to set the wave volume to that same region - near the bottom. Next, my speaker volume is set to low as well. After all this, I'm actually comfortable with the standard operating system sounds.
Unless there's some boost or gain that I haven't noticed, it's more than just the music industry that's having problems.
I find the notion that people are unfamiliar with their volume knobs ludicrous. Putting together tracks with more dynamic range isn't going to make people listen to them at whisper quiet levels -- they're going to turn it up to normal listening volume.
I suppose the good news is that we literally can't compress music more than we are now. We've hit the wall, and the only way to go is the right direction.
Slightly misleading line: Songs are compressed once again into digital files before being sold on iTunes and similar sites.
The first "compression" is traditional audio compression where the dynamic range of the track is "compressed" the second "compression" is digital data compression. These are two completely different things with no relation to each other - the only thing they share is the name.
if your music sounds good on an iPod, you're listening to crap.
Sent from the iPad I found in your car.
Some studios indeed attempt to make the end result of their recordings louder. Why? For one, because the client wants their recording to sound as loud as the other recordings they own. Another, better reason is because it will lift up some detail from below the noise floor into the audible range. Only thing is, there is such a thing as the 'maximum amplitude' that one can represent on the medium. Let's call it 10, these people want to push the volume up to 11 because it will give them a richer listening experience. Now there are various way to do that in the studio. Simplest way is just to make it 'one louder'. Something along the lines of 1. select all, 2. amplitude->maximize, 3. amplitude->amplify->110%, 4. file->save 5. Profit! However this will clip the sound (most likely the bassdrum, in the case of rock bands). This is what the article is complaining about. Example: the Californication album from the Red Hot Chilipeppers. With good (monitoring) speakers you can hear the clipping in the bassdrum. But it's trivial to see this clipping with a wave editor. A better way to up the average volume is to use a dynamic range compressor- smooth out peaks to make them less high, then do amplitude->maximize, and the result is a louder sounding recording without audible artifacts (when properly done). Unless you have a trained studio ear, you'll rarely notice the loss of dynamics, because, that is what a dynamic range compressor is for. However, in extreme cases we *do* notice. In classical recordings, louder passages may not "jump out" so much anymore). So instead of having a richer listening experience, you end up with a poorer one. So it's all a tradeoff. The problem depends on the material that is recorded. You can't go and treat all music styles in the same way. Usually classical recordings do not contain as many 'little detail sounds' as current studio recordings, so you want to do as little as possible to the dynamic range and let the listener decide how loud (s)he wants it. Pop recordings usually do not need as wide a dynamic range, so the sound level is upped artificially. Either way, the sound engineers and record companies are aiming for the richest possible listening experience, albeit in different and opposite ways. In that sense sound engineers and programmers share one thing: they usually have big egos and like to badmouth their competition. Geoff Emerick doesn't seem to be an exception to the rule.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
Basically, TFA is written by someone without the first clue about the difference between dynamic range compression and lossy audio data compression.
The two have absolutely nothing in common and yet they are somehow grouped together by the author.
This is a duplicate article. It was posted in the last 2 years. Slash search sucks so I'm not going to go look for it, but this is old news.
Otherwise I might have to worry about getting quality for my money. Piracy means never having to say "Why did I pay for this?"
We're all going to die. i intend to deserve it.
it's true.. many times the music goes from the original to a mp3, then back to wav, and forth to mp3 and the loss of quality is so big that your ear bleeds
anyways only uncompressed hi quality tracks survive to the process of amplification, because mostly we use only one amplifier for many sources of the digital sound (16 or 24 bits) then the sound distorts with lower volume, and when you amplify it distorts even more, but the level of noise related to the amplifier goes lower because the amplifiers are thought to work betwen 60 and 90 of the total volume.
Usually the amplifiers are thought to be used with high quality speakers which means less lost of sound, and of course less signal of output. But most of speakers sucks wich means a loss of overall volume by 25percent so you have to put the amplifier about 40 percent more to supply the same volume, which leads to an excessive noise at the front of the speaker and of course, the bleeding in your ear.
The percent of quality of sound related to a bad amplifier instead of a good one is about 40-60 percent of the original sound, and if you sum that to the bad processing of sound in a non equipped computer, or the compression-decomp-compression of sound at rates lower than 160kbps, you are in deep trouble, because the ear starts to fail after some years
An usual high quality studio hardware could be a Carver amplifier, and some Yamaha speakers.
I can use some Technics amplifier and JBL speakers as well, but the difference is for about 20 percent of sound loss even with those priced sets.
CD's are cheap and their life is for no more than 5 to 10 years
downloaded mp3 at 320kbps are really close to my needs, but the decompression-amplification process leads to a no less than 15 percent of loss even in the most priced sound hardware.
My ears are broken.. 60 percent off, the left ear, and 35 the right.
I still trust in science.
?
Example, start out at home or in a very quiet environment, keep the volume at what you might consider an appropriate level of hearing. Now go to some place where there is more noise activity, that same volume will not be adequate. What is going on is that people are raising the volume in an attempt to drown out environmental noise. If the outside volume is at 70 decibles, people might raise the player volume to 80 or 90 decibles to listen to music. That can cause permanent hearing loss if exposed to long enough.
There are three options, a headphone/earbud set that is designed specifically to dampen outside noise. The best reduction headphones might get is 25 decibles. The other one would be the noise canceling type of headphones, but they only work for constant noise(like an airplane or a car, I had a pair that worked so good I just left them on for the flight because it reduced the engine noise). The most impractical would be to wear a pair of saftey earplugs and using headphones.
Again when none of these work well, it means the environmental noise is loud to the point where you shouldn't be trying to listen on a portable music player.
Couldn't this be solved by normalization? If most devices had such a function the volume race would be over and the quality race could begin.
There's a version of the 1812 Overture with real cannon fire that will blow out your speakers if the volume is too high. I been trying to get my friend to play that on his 1969 Marshall amp to see if that would happen, how many windows it would take out in the neighborhood and how fast the landlord would kick him out.
I have noticed that the older I get the louder I need music to be. Especially voice.
... Really who the Hell could actually stand "A Scanner Darkley" at normal speed?)
In fact I am 35 and I watch all DVDs with the subtitles. (Of course, part of that is that I watch a lot of DVDs at 1.2x to 2x speed, but
But back to my point, as I age I am less and less able to sift background noise from speech.
And we now live in an aging society.
You can read more about the loudness war here:
m ics.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
It really is true: if you apply too much sound-level compression to a recording, the recording sounds worse. Music is more interesting with some dynamic range. Some of my favorite classic rock songs sound much better from the CD than they do when played on the radio, because the radio station applies sound-level compression.
On the other hand, it's not really wrong for the radio station to apply the sound-level compression; you wouldn't thank them if you set your volume control knob for one song and then the next song was much louder. And the compression helps the music "cut through" the background noise of driving, so you can hear it better. But it is a pity if the CD is mastered with that kind of sound-level compression from the beginning!
Here's another really good web page about this.
http://www.mindspring.com/~mrichter/dynamics/dyna
Just take a look at the Ricky Martin song. The gain was set far too high, and as a result many waveforms went outside legal bounds; when you try to master a CD with a wave that is simply too extreme to be legal, it is hard-clipped to make it legal. That sort of clipping makes an unpleasant sound, and makes the CD sound even louder. And hard-clipping means discarding audio data; there is no way to reconstruct it later.
The above is one of the reasons why vinyl LPs still have their fans. You simply cannot push an LP so hard that it's playing hard-clipped square waves. But a well-mastered CD will have more dynamic range than even the best-mastered LP, and less distortion. (Some of the distortion you get with an LP can actually improve your music, and that's another of the reasons why LPs still have fans. But you could apply a digital effect that sounded like LP distortion, if you wanted to.)
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Couldn't we just add a tag to every track with a floating point number by which to multiply the magnitude of all the samples in that track by default.
You already have a built in upper limit, normalizing the range to that limit fixes the problem.
Normalize-audio is a package that does this. Here's what the Debian repository says:
The package also works on ogg vorbis and mp3. You can do it on ripping, or playback. Each song can be normalized individually or as a collection. The result is that you don't have to reach for the volume knob all day.
You are SOL if the record company has already applied dumb techniques to the CD before you get it. Peak "compressing", where all of the peaks are maxed out is a real distoriton of the original sound. When you add a heavy handed turn up that clips as well, you get Californication as mentioned. As the article also notes, it's difficult to digitize clipped audio. A clipped wave is like a square wave - it has all frequencies and takes lots of bandwith.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
THIS IS SO FUCKING OLD.
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
My SoundBlaster Audigy X-Fi Elite has Dolby Digital settings: Night, Normal, and Full. The Night level tries to keep all sounds - quiet dialog to explosions - in the same volume amplitude. I can keep my speakers turned down and still hear the dialog as well as the explosions. Normal widens that range so the explosions are louder than dialog. However, I nearly always keep it on Full - dialog is low (like it is in real life), but the explosions are loud. It's great for horror movies, etc. where sound is used to create the mood.
So these Dolby settings can be used to "quiet" down these soundtracks. However, if the volume has already been encoded above a maximum level (think of a sine wave with the peaks and troughs capped), the quieter sound will still be distorted.
The pioneer of this kind of thing was Phil Spector. He was maybe the most famous/influential producer of all time. Among other things, he used to listen to the music he produced on a truly lousy audio system, the car radio. His music was tailored to sound good on a car radio. Given the number of albums he sold, you have to say he was right. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Spector
The connection between music, the environment, the ear and the mind is seriously studied and is reasonably well understood.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoacoustic_model
Here is an excellent article giving the background behind the "Loudness War" and a case study of a particular album. It is dated September 2002. This odious practice has been escalating for a long time.
Amps that go to 11 are old news. Nigel confirmed it himself that he now has amps that go to infinity. On The Satch Tapes. Or was he saying that Satriani had those amps? I forget. Whatever the case may be, somebody has amps that go to infinity dammit. Top that you evil volume level compressors!
It's tough being able to hear.
I know what you mean, and I'm not even old and wise. I went to a concert for the first time in a few years, and was reminded of why I stopped. I had to wear ear plugs most of the time, which, since they don't attenuate all frequencies evenly, totally messed up the sound.
Imagine if, when you entered an art gallery, they stabbed out one of your eyes. That's how much sense it makes to destroy people's hearing when they go to concerts.
Another unimprtant and useless topic. How did I come to this conclusion? Via something I call the "Caveman test". It goes as such.
When determining whether something is truly worth caring about, I apply the following question to it: "Would this issue be worth fretting about if you were a caveman living during caveman times?" If the the answer is yes, it is care-worthy. No, and it gets forgotten quicker than Janet Jackson's nipple.
I never reach for the volume control from song to song, because all music I listen to has been ReplayGained. They're all the same average volume after that processing, so I just set my desired listening level, and that's that. One song isn't louder or quieter, overall, than the next one. CDs should be mastered to meet ReplayGain's levels to begin with. Older CDs with nice mastering are actually pretty damn close. I don't know how this issue is taking so long to deal with, lots of us have been complaining about this clipping for well over a decade.
WHY are albums mastered so damn loud?
It's a vicious circle and it is caused essentially by one feature: shuffle mode.
Here's how the problem reveals itself:
Band A decides they want to have the "heaviest, loudest album ever made", so they tell the mastering engineer to make their master louder.
Band B is hears Band A's album and wants to be louder (or at least AS LOUD) as Band A. So they tell their mastering engineer to pump up the volume, too.
Assume the same thing happens with Bands C through L.
Now Band M comes along and they've had these other 12 albums playing on iTunes while they're mixing their album. Band M isn't so concerned with being "the loudest", but when the put their ref CD into iTunes and are listening in shuffle mode, their songs get completely drowned out by a factor of 6-12 dB of amplitude difference.
So Band M now asks their mastering engineer to make their master louder so they'll match up with everyone else's.
And Bands N-Z follow suit.
It's a very difficult domino knockdown to break out of, since no one wants to make the album that is super quiet and requires intervention with the volume knob. (Yes, I'm aware of the "Sound Check" feature in iTunes, but that's just a lousy attempt to solve the problem with technology.)
In 2005 I recorded an album for a Hawaiian band. It was gorgeous and I convinced the band to master the album at Universal because I knew the main mastering engineer and was adamant that he was the ONLY guy who could do the record justice. I was also adamant that the album did NOT need (and would avoid) any compression.
We only boosted the overall level of the album by 4 dB and that was purely using a limiter to ensure no overs.
I then sent the first ref CD to the band member who couldn't be present. He was thrilled with the mastering but had just one question: Do they make it louder when the CDs get pressed?
I told him that it was at the level I was recommending and that Mastering was the time to change levels, but that we really wanted it to sound good, not loud. His response? "Oh. But it's so much quieter than every other CD I own."
And he's right. Compared to every CD that has come out in the past 5 years, his album is seriously quiet. Possibly as much as 8 dB quieter than current albums. And maybe we did it TOO quiet. But it matches in amplitude to CDs that came out in 1989, back when some dynamic range was still an OK thing in music. Nowadays we don't like ANY dynamics.
So who is right? And can we go back?
I've been a HUGE advocate of dynamic range and NOT destroying our months of hard work at the last step in the process. But I can only do what my clients want. And I was really hoping we had a chance with DVD-Audio and other surround formats, but the over-compressors are winning out there, now, too. And it's a bigger problem on that format, since you are now forcing people to change levels between movies and surround music, when both are calibrated identically.
Jory
"The brain is not geared to accept buzzing. The CDs induce a sense of fatigue in the listeners. It becomes psychologically tiring and almost impossible to listen to. This could be the reason why CD sales are in a slump."
The <b> is added for emphasis. The "buzzing" is clipping - where the audio signal peaks and the wave is squared off. Cloth ears don't make you immune to that.
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
Competent Artists who've heard of Dynamic Range:
Sigur Ros
Rufus Wainwright
Belle & Sebastian
Radiohead
Gorillaz
DJ Shadow
Goldfrapp [Felt Mountain]
Competent Artists who've heard of Dynamic Range, but choose to use a lot of compression anyway:
M83
Outkast
Daft Punk
++
Compression is not the death of an album, and there are still artists who do not use it every song.
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
Its the same when I go out every week to hear one of my favorite bands play.. they don't need to be so loud to be enjoyed but the sound-desk guy cant resist getting the maximum volume out of the sound system. I must admit when I used to work as a dj, it was very tempting to crank it to the max.. Also I think its a great idea how they are releasing higher quality DRM free tracks on itunes. I advice people NOT to buy music online sometimes simply because DRM causes such headaches.. Paul
Computer Consultant http://www.itcallout.com.au/
Don't blame the band for a shitty mix. Most of the time it's beyond their control, unless they're firmly established as a well-known act and they're really pushy about it.
In blind testing of audio equipment, it is critical to match volume levels within a fraction of a decibel. That is because people have a strong tendency to prefer a slightly louder source. In blind testing, listeners will describe the louder source as better in all sorts of subjective ways that have nothing to do with loudness: brighter, richer, warmer, etc. This happens with any kind music, from chamber music to stadium rock.
I think the article oversimplifies somewhat by casting this as a matter of taste for loud rock music, rather than a more subtle issue of psychoacoustics.
It's been going on for years - Oasis albums are basically unlistenable: horribly engineered, and they actually sound clipped. The newspapers wheeled out the example of Californication (Red Hot Chili Peppers) last week and they are right. Not quite as bad as Oasis, but half of the tracks are unlistenable. It ruins good songs like Californication itself.
I also find it really annoying to have the volume level OK, then suddenly everything is too loud and distorted when the next album comes on, because some asshat of a recording engineer pushed the levels up until the waveforms clipped.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
The sound during commercials is also compressed to have a real high perceived level.
I once hooked up a digital oscilloscope to my TV set while watching a movie.
During the film it was just the usual scope image, with highs and lows.
During the commercial the scope image was almost a filled rectangle.
That's why you can seem to turn the volume of commercials down. Thank god for mute.
This is why God gave us volume controls on the steering wheel.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoacoustic_model
Psychoacoustics alone will never lead one to a "reasonable" understanding of that rather elaborate set of connections, it's fairly mechanistic and limited to subjective responses. You'd be invoking culture and society: much more elusive, chaotic, and difficult to measure. Like most psychology, it lacks sufficient inputs. I concede that psychoacoustics has made some pretty big leaps recently, but not that it understands the big "connections."
To get a handle on "the connection between music-environment-ear-mind" you'd have to be studying the more interdisciplinary "acoustic communications" which is only studied in a relatively limited way as yet, sometimes called "acoustic ecology" or soundscape studies. The World Forum for Acoustic Ecology is a good place to start getting an overview.
Damn those pesky terrorists
Just listening the Islands LP while reading the posts... I feel sorry for those who don't have the chance to listen old good music in the old fashioned way...
What's in a sig?
Nay, nay, and nay. The CD by its architecture has a dynamic headroom of 96 dB. Make it 90, to compensate for poor AD/DA converters. No pop band will ever use this full headroom, no matter what. Maybe classical music does, but not always. It's plenty. As an audio engineer, you can play with it just fine. The artist can express herself by using loudness levels - louder parts, quieter parts, depending on what you want to say. What happens here is audio engineers making the quieter parts louder, and limiting the loud parts so that the average dynamics is less than 30 dB sometimes, hence a millionth of what the transport medium can accomodate. The main reason is to make listening in noisy areas easier - cars, subways, in the street, etc. A song with too quiet parts will hardly get any airplay. This is mass market, not art. Hence the limiters and compressors in the studio.
Compression as such is an absolutely unneccessary part of recording, if the audio engineer knows his job, and the producer keeps his mouth shut.
open (SIG, "</dev/zero"); $sig = <SIG>; close SIG;
I work in the Live Sound business
It is well known that if you ask Non-audio person to choose between 2 different speakers as to which one sounds better, they will always choose the Loudest one regardless of tone.
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
When an sound engineer talks about "compression" he means compressing the dynamic range to make the music sound louder.
This is NOT the same thing as compressing sound to save disk space.
No sig today...
Just compare the evolution from Mercury Zero+Mercury One (a naive rework of Beethovens first symphony) to The Poems of the Heart (an experiment to mix rock/metal and techno).
The first is clean, has a decent dynamic range but sounds hollow and powerless. The last was deliberately made as loud as I could given my limited means, without turning the volume to 11 and brutal clipping.
Tricks I used, in order:
PS:
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
Get a set of these:
:)
http://www.etymotic.com/ephp/er20.aspx
I never go to clubs/raves/live music events without them. It makes it heaps easy to talk to people when wearing them too
I'm sure your Hawaiian band have a well recorded album, that'll still be enjoyable in 20 years when the loudness fad has died out.
There's a trick we engineers play on unsuspecting 'rock star' bands who come in unprepared, perform badly and then give us a hard time for not being able to make them sound good. We playback loud on the main monitors and escape to the live room or lounge. The band think their track sounds great, rapidly their ears tire and they lose all objectivity.
The loudness wars are the same trick played on everyone, it makes an impact for 5 minutes because it's loud and punchy. In reality it sounds terrible, no dynamic range and insane amounts of clipping.
Almost a decade ago I maxxed out a track on a rough mix for an EP as a caricature of the loudness wars, got it pumping using compression at the mix and then slammed the bus through a limiter before finally abusing loudness plugins. At the time it was a bit of fun and sounded stupid. I worked with the guitarist and his new band last year and he brought that CD in. The former comedy track would sit well in modern playlists.
I've used MP3Gain to rescue as much as can be rescued. It's close to but not really normalizing. From the FAQ: "Yes, but MP3Gain does not use "peak amplitude" normalization as many "normalizers" do. Audio files with very different peak amplitudes can still sound to the human ear as though they're the same volume. Instead, MP3Gain uses David Robinson's Replay Gain algorithm to calculate how loud the file actually sounds to a human's ears."
And it's free. http://mp3gain.sourceforge.net/
"We have an A-Bomb...what more do you want, mermaids?" --I.I. Rabi, speaking in defense of Robert Oppenheimer
You are right, when an sound engineer talks about "compression" he means compressing the dynamic range to make the music sound louder. But when we talk about what is going on with the recent DRM-free better-quality downloads offered by EMI and how why EMI did what it did from an economical point of view, as we have been doing in this subthreat since the very first post, we don't talk about sound engineers.
While most people here think if RIAA as an evil anti-sharing group, back before they turned to the dark side, they used to set decent audio standards. Too bad that was in the era when hi-fi records were new.
The volume compression crud is one of their more recent "technology advancements". Volume compression is isn't data compression but reefers to horizontally compressing the waveform or boosting the quiet bits and cutting the loud bits.
This is why modern music has no emotion. The soft bits get boosted and the high energy bits get clipped. It is why most remastered CDs suck so bad.
Its also why rap is so popular. Rap's verbal beat messes up the auto-compressors and break them and since rap is about the only modern music that has an energy, its got a huge younger following.
> so that the music punches through when it competes against background noise in pubs or cars
WTF, in pubs the music *is* the background noise! I go there to hang out with people, not to be deafened by music. I'll do that at home or at concerts, thank you...
... it's something that very distinctly reared it's head in the early to mid nineties. Listen to records from before that time, and they're quieter than anything done in the later nineties. And I'm sure you can track that development back even further.
Amazing that people only find out today.
Modern music is now a solid block of sound - the pictures really do tell the whole story..
a me
m e
Graphs:
http://www.cutestudio.net/doku.php?id=hi-fi:cd:cd
The Black-Eyed-Peas CD I bought has 0.6 of a second of music entirely clipped out, and the average clip rate across the whole album is 54.4Hz?
The worst CDs:
http://www.cutestudio.net/doku.php?id=hi-fi:cd:sh
The Best CDs:
http://www.cutestudio.net/doku.php?id=hi-fi:cd:fa
Please bear in mind this is a limited selection of CDs, and CDs mastered in different countries can have very very different clip rates - even though they appear to be the identical CD.
here:
i cle/imperfect-sound-forever.htm
1 992325,00.html
http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/weekly_art
and here:
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,
Television commercials have had the volume artificially jacked-up for many years, perhaps decades now? To rephrase the OP quote: "It is because television companies don't trust the viewer to decide themselves if they want to pay attention during commercials." So they crank it up to make damned sure we do.
very old news but nice to see some attention on it.
Just a note, there are still competent studios that focus on quality for those that value it.
It may still be "lousy", but it's a *lot* less lousy than constantly reaching for the volume control.
The volume wars affect even artists like me who are unsigned. When we submit our music to radio stations, magazines for review, etc, most of the morons who listen to the CD's will immediately notice if your music isn't within the ballpark volume-wise of the other music they get, and they'll think less of you. For my last CD I tried to go as hot (volume-wise) as I could but still maintain a clean undistorted sound. It's not that hard to do, and it makes all the difference in the world. But my music is still nowhere near as loud as, say, the new Maroon 5 distorted overproduced clipped mess. Sigh.
Music - www.richardmac.com
...it's certainly not getting any better!
I don't like those compressed tracks myself, but think about it. When they compress the volume, they are likely making the listener turn the volume down, because everything can be heard anyway. Uncompressed music on the other hand has to be played at a higher volume to hear everything that is not loud, and then the transient spikes wreck your ears.
It's called dynamic range compression, and it's going to take your baby away! Compression makes soft sounds louder, and loud sounds softer (relatively). It also makes cheap stereos sound "better", and good stereos sound like they're about to die.
It actually has some very important uses, for example in FM broadcasting where it boosts weak frequencies in the music to improve their signal-to-noise ratio after modulation. It's also used properly by respectable sound producers to bring out hidden character in instruments or vocals, or to make that speed metal guitarist sound like he has fingers made of steel. It's used in films to keep the background music from clobbering dialogue. It is extensively used on drums to make them punchier. It's also the not-so-secret sauce behind the techno-dance sound by Benny Benassi and Daft Punk, that carefully controlled distortion that makes everything pump with the bass kick.
Like any great thing, it is royally abused by a certain group of asshats. It's what makes commercials sound so damned loud relative to your show. It's what makes film soundtracks survivable on shitty home theater kits. Worst of all, it's mostly controlled by two knobs: 1. how sensitive do you want it, and 2. how much boost do you want. Pop music "producers" just turn these all the way up and call themselves hitmakers.
It's like taking the subtly charming warmth of mag tape or tube amps, multiplying it by 1000 and watching the unwashed masses fall victim to harmonic heresy. Given that the large majority of people have underperforming stereos with poor treble that already compress the sound to some extent, they often don't notice the crap quality of the source. Then you drop the same album on a refined stereo, and you hear this grungy fuzz coming from your speakers. Musical whispers that should have been barely audible are now fighting with the lead guitar for attention.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
The 'smiley face' EQ curve is actually desirable if you are listening at lower than usual volume levels. It's a known property of the human ear (discovered by Fletcher and Munson in 1933) that we are better at hearing midrange sounds at low levels. While it's true that the eq will have been set by the professional engineers who recorded the music, since they do not know the volume level you will be playing it back at, they cannot compensate for the changes in eq perception at low levels (or indeed high levels). To get back to what they intended, the 'smile curve' should be applied at low levels and it's oppostite at high levels.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Maybe you haven't noticed in the last year that the compression is getting so high and the levels are going ABOVE 0dB! Many producers are obviously willing to completely turn the music to static just to get it louder. Wouldn't surprise me for a whole new genre of "static" music to be developed. Listen to Sleater Kinney's The Woods for an example. A lot of alt-rock is already this loud.
my paper today said the people who sold handwash flyers after saying they were required were guilty of extortion.
in my book, degrading musical quality and then charging for 'better quality' is extortion.
complain to the DA
But it's poor hifi systems, radio (net and FM) which is the problem. People want a cheap tiny stereo to sound punchy, so they compress the dynamics so it sounds acceptable.
Classical music public radio stations are supposed to be bastions of sanity and concern for quality, right?
Well, the choir I'm in collaborated with another choir and the local symphony orchestra to put on Carmina Burana. So we did -- great show and such. The recording was broadcast by the local public radio station the next day. I recorded it off the air (with decent equipment that isn't the culprit), since the symphony wasn't going to make their recording available to the singers (something about union rules).
Carmina starts (and ends) with the piece "O Fortuna" -- you've probably heard it. Theme song to Excalibur, used and spoofed in tons of advertisements, etc. There is a short (~15 second) ridiculously loud introduction, about a minute of very quiet music, thirty seconds of loud, and then forty seconds of extreme loud -- if you know the piece you know what I mean. All the dynamic changes are sudden. It's the poster child for dynamic range, and the effect is wonderful.
I get the recording, and the quiet bit is just as loud as the rest. WTF? I pull the waveform on Audacity -- flat.
Aargh!
Then I started listening, and you can hear it all over the place in much of their music. Peak limiters and such kick in to reduce the level whenever there is a high-amplitude sound... so you can actually hear the rest of the orchestra suddenly get softer when the bass drum goes off. The bass drum isn't that *loud*, thanks to the response curves of human ears and the frequency-power connection, but it is high-amplitude and triggers the peak limiter like nobody's business. (Orchestral bass drums have a very, very deep sound.)
It's ridiculous.
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/200
Well, it's supported by most things not iTunes, so yes, "the rest of the world". FLAC, LAME, WavPack, MPC, Vorbis etc all support it natively, and WinAMP, fb2k, xmms, amarok and plenty of other players will make use of it if configured to do so, as will many portable DAP's. Even my iPod supports it (with Rockbox, which also supports about 10x as many music formats).
"Sound Check, on the other hand, works by actually measuring the loudness of the audio and then adjusting things based on the actual measurements"
Err, yes, htf do you think Replay Gain works? You scan each track and the entire album, find the peak loudness and store them in a pair of tags which are used by the player to renormalize. Sound Check appears to be very similar, but only works on individual tracks, and only in iTunes.
Reducing dynamic range IS compression (and it's not just lossy - dynamic range is LOST for good). It's just a different type of compression than the data compression that most /.'ers are familiar with. The article that /. posted is poorly written and confused. The linked articles in the above post are MUCH better and more accurate.
I first read "The Death of Dynamic Range" several years ago and often refer people to that article to explain to people why "remastered" cd's so often sound so crappy and tire their ears. The music industry has been fucking with people's ears for years now and it is a absolute travesty.
It may just be the crappy audio on my PC, but it seems like a lot of the audio is clipped as well. The Johnny Cash remake of "Hurt" starts off fine, but when he gets to the loud parts, it just sounds awfully distorted...
Is clipped audio represented on the CD or in MP3s? It seems like you should always be able to represent a non-clipped waveform using digital audio - that it would be the playback equipment that would introduce any clipping based on it's capabilities. Is this accurate?
Try this free GPL licensed declipper
t er:remaster
Wot I wrote:
http://www.cutestudio.net/doku.php?id=hi-fi:remas
See what it does first here:
http://www.cutestudio.net/doku.php?id=hi-fi:cd:cd
It can solve most problems, I'd be interested if people can try it on the Californication tracks - I'm not going to buy that CD because the mastering is so bad. The downloadable porgram suite contains daapd - an iTunes server than runs on Linux, and de-clips any WAV file requested on the fly.
My program de-clips most stuff using a variety of techniques detailed on the web-page, and can quite easily be used as the front-end to any digital encoding program as required.
I know the information is technically lost, but this program really does make a huge difference.
They take a recording then spend extra effort to distort it, which is not what their customers want.
Furthermore, if you don't want them to spend the extra effort to mess it up, you have to give them more money.
Is it just me or is this logic REALLY screwed?
Add Replay Gain metadata to your mp3s with http://mp3gain.sourceforge.net/.
I don't use earbuds because I simply can't hear anything through them when used at a reasonable volume level outside of quiet environment. I'm inclined to believe no one else can either as evidenced by the sound I hear blaring (sometimes loud enough to be heard right through my own circumaural headphones) from everyone's buds on my daily commute. Since the start of the iPod era, earbuds have become the standard for portable audio. Prior to that, only the cheapest of devices shipped with buds as opposed to phones. I would imagine this trend is a huge contributor to the loudness problem.
Here's an illustration of the problem, so us non-audiophiles can understand :P
Modern sound recordings suck and the recordings are even worse if you download. Makes a lot of sense considering most people listen to music through speakers the size of DIMES.
EMI and a Sony Company both offer some sort of music file that is "better" than other recordings, for a price.
THIS "STORY" WAS AN ADVERTISEMENT.
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
There are two dynamic levels, with no crescendos, just jump between them.
The levels are, "singer whining" and "singer yelling."
As someone who is just re-learning music mixing and mastering (golly, have things changed since the 80s!) I gotta say, it takes about a day to learn this idiot-simple formula. With auto-faders it's pushbutton easy.
Who would have thought that a band named "Nirvana" would cause a musical hell? please make it stop! Okay you asked for it, Make It Stop DRM-free MPEG-4 AAC. Not much subtlety but it is named correctly.
> It's a vicious circle and it is caused essentially by one feature: shuffle mode.
Your explanation is great. iTunes has a "Sound Check" function where songs' sound levels are adjusted to make them about the same level. Doesn't that solve the problem? Maybe as more people use jukebox software (with a similar feature as Sound Check) to manage their music, there will be no reason for a loudness arms race since the volume will get turned down by the music anyway.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
I understand what they're doing, but is this any different than what Phil Specter used to do with his "wall of sound"?
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
is bands selling quality cds to the average customer and giving those overcompressed audio files to radio stations and bars who want them.
Personally, I would like to be able to control dynamic range compression with a knob. If it's late at night, and I'm listening to a symphony on headphones in a quiet house, I want the full dynamic range. If I'm listening in the car, or on a portable mp3 player, I want dynamic range compression, because otherwise I have to keep fiddling with the volume to find a comfortable listening level.
The simplest way to implement this would be to take a running time-average of the power for, say, 5 seconds, and compensate for the changes in volume if the user has the compression turned up.
A nicer way to do it would be to have a separate, low-bandwidth track created by a human engineer using musical judgment. This track would be similar to the running time-average, but it would be more carefully tweaked to avoid goofy-sounding artifacts. Could, e.g., Ogg Vorbis store such an optional, low-bandwidth track in such a way that it would be ignored by player that didn't implement it?
Find free books.
The 'Floyd' graph show that there are still a number of well recorded CDs with good dynamics, the older stuff in general is far better to listen to.
I remember buying a Kid Rock CD back in 1998 (no comments from the peanut gallery, please) and listening to it in my car (with a mediocre stereo) as well as my better-sounding home stereo. I remember thinking to myself that the album sounded as if it were edited to sound good on a crappy radio.
Sent from my iPhone
Slashdot has covered this before. Rush's 2002 offering, "Vapor Trails", suffered greatly from bad mixing. I have both the CD and 128 MP3s, and while the CD's sound quality is down but borderline tolerable, the MP3s are awful. When comparing Grace Under Pressure (1984) to Vapor Trails (2002), the difference in the quality and overall volume of the recording was substantial. (Off-topic: Alex Lifeson should NEVER be allowed to re-mix an older Rush album...)
I've also heard this same problem with other artists. Joe Satriani's album recording levels have grown too loud on some of his more recent albums. Compared to his earlier CDs (Time Machine, self-titled (1995?)), which were very clean recordings that you can turn way up without distortion, Crystal Planet (1998) and Engines of Creation (2000) are both considerably louder and crunchier, suffering from clipping. (Which is really sad, because Crystal Planet might be his best album overall).
It seems like the sound quality has improved a bit in some cases (at least on Rush & Joe Satriani's latest albums), but as others have said, it's still a problem. It is all about engineers and executives making the music louder and louder to sound better, and that attitude has permeated all levels of popular music.
You can't please all of the people all of the time, but it seems that
this timeless bit of wisdom is always being blatantly ignored.
Some want/need it monotonously loud. Some prefer the nuances of an
ever changing dynamic range. The only solution is to offer a variety
of options and choices. The "one size fits all" strategy, although
economically compelling, can only breed much consternation and conflict
-- as we see in the arguments and dismay over this particular issue.
With more variety and choice in the marketplace all such concerns
would become strictly moot.
I mean, I remember my father telling me about this in the '70s. Except it was about buying pre-recorded tapes versus buying records and making your own tapes.
Use of compression and limiting is worthy of an article? What's next, cooks use heat? Oh, I guess it's only newsworthy if they burn something...
Finally you get to the heart of the matter.
Get Audacity. Import a few tracks off of modern CDs. Look at the squared off waveforms. Then take a CD from, say, the late 1980s or early 1990s and look at the waveforms on that. Note the less clipped waveforms? Then take a listen. You will be amazed.
Oversaturating analog tape is fine because the clipping is more organic and less buzzy. In fact, you get a bit more presence from "recording hot." Oversaturating digital recording media? You get ugly digital clipping, artifacts, and buzz galore. Yet numb-nuts producers insist on "recording hot" when recording to digital. Result? Crappy recordings.
I am always struck by how wildly better the state of recording in the '70s was to what it is now. This is part of the reason. Don't get me started about Autotune.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
For me, I was born partially deaf. I wear an analog bone conduction hearing aid (Oticon 380P -- I think a 10 years old model). I hate it when movie theaters, concerts, plays, etc. are SO loud. But I have an advantage. Turn my hearing aid down or off. :) What's funny is that sometimes they're still loud even if I turn it off! Ugh!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
That's why I suggest everyone go back to vinyl. In all seriousness. Vinyl sounds better, because it's mastered better. I just purchased a mint condition copy of The Times they are a Changin by Bob Dylan record for 3$ and it sounds a lot better then the CD. The harmonica stands out over the guitar and vocals like it should. All these new "REMASTERED!!!11!" versions of new albums suck. Nothing beats hearing it like the artist originally intended.
622677120
http://haha.nu/interesting/the-loudness-war/
There are 10 types of people in the world; those who understand binary and those who don't.
Pro-rec not available, but fortunately there was a mirror.
. htm
This guy wrote about it 5 years ago on the web.
http://moozeek.de/mirrors/articles/over_the_limit
It is informative. And something to show your friends who say, "yeah, but that album isn't as loud. The newer albums are better."
The reference CD for amazing dynamic range on a popular rock album is Pink Floyd's "The Wall". We can argue about the music, the lyrics, the message, but there's no arguing that the recording, mixing and mastering of this album is second to none in the pop and rock world. The quiet birds chirping just before the girl says "Look mummy, there's an airplane up in the sky" contrast sharply to the smashing of the televisions or the deafening helicopter.
:)
As far as truly loud rock and roll albums, Robert John "Mutt" Lange (aka Mr. Shania Twain) has a long tradition of producing punchy, loud rock albums that still manage to keep a decent dynamic range....Def Leppard, The Cars, even AC/DC albums produced by "Mutt" are layered with music without compressing it beyond listenability (if that's a word).
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
I'd like to find out what music in my collection is tainted by this loudness boosting. Is there a way I can find out using Audacity? Should I look for points in the wave where's it's forced straight by the digital boundaries?
The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. -Anais Nin
My point is that this is a player function, so it doesn't matter what the rest of the world uses, as long as your player uses it, then you're fine. Sound Check is not susceptible to network effects.
This article contains lines plagiarised from the following article: http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/weekly_arti cle/imperfect-sound-forever.htm
example:
Stylus article: The Beatles lobbied Parlophone to get their records pressed on thicker vinyl so they could achieve a bigger bass sound more than 40 years ago.
TimesOnline: The Beatles lobbied Parlophone, their record company, to get their records pressed on thicker vinyl so they could achieve a bigger bass sound.
Most of what I mentioned are *encoders*: Hm, don't see it in oggenc, but still, lame, probably the most popular lossy audio encoder around appears to calculate it by default, and it's trivial for a player to calculate it on first play or on import, which is precisely what Apple will do with Sound Check, because that's how these things work if they're not already there.
It's an *algorithm* with some standard named tags, not an application; the point being Apple did their Not Invented Here thing like they did with ALAC, and came up with something not quite as good as what thousands of people were already using happily.
Now, err, what were we supposed to be talking about again?
Compress and distort the music down until it sounds horrible, then come out with a remastered version a few years later! Hooray for capitalism! Listen to a Rush album from the 80's (if you can, heh) and then "Vapor Trails". The compression was so bad on the latter you can hear static during a number of songs. The record company keeps promising to remaster and rerelease the album. Dollar signs for everyone.
-
Make an album sound horrible, then rerelease it a few years later as a Remastered Classic. Ah, capitalism, how I love thee. Let me count the ways...
-
BSplayer (get older versions, new ones are adware) offers playback speeds between 1% and >500% in one percent intervals, though no built-in pitch-correctionh _modification,)
/w included libcodec ) 5% intervals between 5% and 300% percent with acceptable quality, 270% speed works fine on 800MHz P-III.
/w EAX provided Time Scaling.
& cid=7113290
(ie. Time stretching, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_timescale-pitc
with winamp plugins such as Chronotron from 25% to 400% in 0.1% intervals with very good sound quality but brings a 2.4GHz P4 down to it's knees at >200% speeds.
With Adapt-x + Studiotime (http://www.acondigital.com/us_StudioTime.html ) not quite as great a quality, 0.1% between 33% and 200% with far lower CPU usage.
With The KMPlayer (http://www.kmplayer.com/forums/index.php , portable software
Hardware solution: Creative Audigy series sound cards
GOMPlayer : very similar to KMPlayer except not portable, 10% to 400% in 10% intervals.
Without subtitles , usually watch at speeds between 200% and 250% , except for Gilmore Girls.
With subtitle , between 270% and 300%.
All that comes via Television watched as described in this post:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=80789
Sound Check is not something with standard named tags that exists in the encoder. It is something which exists only within the player, so that it works with all of your files, even the ones (which in my case is probably 100% of them) which do not have these standard named tags.
Since we seem to be wandering, my point is thus: Sound Check is quite different from ReplayGain, and considerably more useful to the sort of person who, like myself, collects music from diverse sources which is not likely to be tagged with ReplayGain. As such, it wasn't a cut and dried choice of duplicating the standard in an incompatible fashion, but rather creating something new which ends up doing similar things.
Certainly Apple could augment Sound Check by reading these tags when they exist instead of analyzing the audio directly, and writing these tags out so that they could be picked up by other players, but Sound Check is not simply gratuitously incompatible.
Lest I come off as a fanboi, Sound Check is also fairly useless because its analysis sucks. I actually notice more variation in volume in my library with it on than with it off. But the idea is good....
In the 60's and 70's, companies like Raytheon and Fairchild were offering the "leveler" as a feature in commercial radio and studio equipment. Essentially, the Leveler was a light bulb coupled with a light-sensitive resistor: The brighter the light, the lower the signal level.
In excess, these things sounded like a brick wall. I suspect that Paul McCartney & Wings "Band On The Run" album used heavy Leveler processing because many pieces of it just sound like there is no change in dynamics. Levelers were popular with radio becuase they constrained dynamics without destroying subtlties.
A few years ago, levelers saw a resurgance in the home studio market. I notice today, some studios take this concept to the extreme with digital equivalents to the Leveler. Witness the obvious: Los Lonley Boys "Sacred" album.
The last thing you want is your iPod wasting battery power and time scanning each song before it plays it to determine the volume...
Advanced users are users too!
Replaygain is exactly what GP wants
The moment I got decent speakers (Magnepan MG-Is, about $1000) and took the time to set them up, I never touched tone controls again, and like most audiophiles (damn, I just outed myself) the high-end equipment I occasionally buy doesn't come with any tone controls. I hear everything that's going on in the music and it sounds great, except for the crappy mixing and limiting the TFA discusses. The number one thing you can do to improve the sound of your music system is return all the tone controls to flat, and adjust the position of your speakers. Even in a noisy environment like a car, keep returning all the EQ to flat.
The second most important thing you can do to improve the sound is protect your hearing — remind yourself to turn the volume down after you rock out, and carry earplugs (or scrounge cigarette butts and put them in candy wrappers).
=S
What I want is a format that stores everything at a quieter level that maximizes it's dynamic range
That's what normalize audio does.
and software that plays it back as loud as the producers wanted it, unless the user intervenes to turn the volume down.
I'm not sure why you would give control of volume to the producer, but that's what you get from CDs now and it's pot luck. In the best cases, they maximize dynamic range and you get what the artist intended. In other cases, they use crappy tools and use some sorry subset of the whole range. Still in other cases, they "compress" distort and clip it. If that's what you want, do nothing special and you have it.
I'll stick with normalized audio. Most GNU/Linux rippers and players come with it by default. Whit it, I don't have to mess with the volume knob, the music is always loud enough to hear but never so loud that I get blasted out. Once you get used to it, stuff from inferior rippers sucks. I notice the difference when if I forget to run it on stuff I get from archive.org, tapes or albums.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Yeah, without pitch correction, everything sounds like South Park...
What the marketing guys don't notice that over aggressive advertising creates resentments. I for once now have a "mute button reflex" which takes over when commertials begin (apart from an almost advert free pay tv substcription).
So for any advertiser who has not booked the first 5 sec: I won't be listening.
No, you completely missed what I was saying; *both* Sound Check AND Replay Gain require you to analyze the audio directly, if the tags do not exist. They function *identically* in that regard, it's just the precise algorithm used when scanning the files and determining the gain which differs. Apple could have supported Replay Gain *exactly* how they support Sound Check, as far as users are concerned (with some additional logic if they wanted to support album mode).
The algorithm is described here. Whatever Sound Check uses doesn't appear to be documented, and it seems to lack the "Audiophile" (Album) version described here. Either way, both involve a one-time analysis of the audio (which can and often is done by encoders like LAME, just as Sound Check is likely done by Apple's encoders, but this is by no means necessary; it just saves work for the player), and the use of tags to store the result, and both *attempt* to do the same sort of thing.
Going by what you're saying about Sound Check, Apple didn't bother with some of the more subtle aspects of determining a suitable gain (that, or album mode makes a real difference; I never really tried Replay Gain in single track "Radio" mode). This makes the comparison with ALAC more apt, really; ALAC's somewhat similar to FLAC in design, but misses some details which result in it having both lower compression ratio and higher decode complexity.
When you talk about digital audio "compression" you have to be careful because compression means a different thing at different stages of audio production. I have yet to see an article on the Internet about digital audio and compression where the author didn't mix this up at least once.
DYNAMICS COMPRESSION (compress the audible dynamic range)
During mixing and mastering, the dynamic range of the audio content is compressed. The softest sounds are made louder and the loudest sounds are made softer. This is what music and audio people think of first if you talk about compression.
Dynamics compression has nothing at all to do with bits, this can be done acoustically, electrically, or digitally, it is about audio. The human ear does outrageous dynamics compression. Analog tape machines have a built-in dynamics compression that is considered to be musically useful and that is imitated today by digital. If you don't do that, you don't have "rock" music. Take away a rock band's dynamics compression and you have a really lame jazz combo, it is all the same instruments, the difference between the sound of jazz and rock drums is 98% dynamics compression. For rock vocals the compressor/limiter is more important then the microphone. Whether the singer whispers or screams it should all be the same volume. If it is not, you can't believe the complaining you will hear about it from everybody because that is not what rock singing sounds like. It is all the same volume. Go and listen to your records, the singer is right there in the front of your skull the whole time.
If you want music with a broad dynamic range there is plenty of it around, it just doesn't sell very well. With a broad dynamic range you have to turn up the volume high to catch the low sounds, and you have to shut the fuck up so you can actually listen to the musical presentation like you would a concert performer. This covers at most 10% of music listeners who are going to do that. Most people listen to music as an accompaniment to their lives like a movie soundtrack. They are running or partying or dancing or reading or whatever while they listen. For that purpose you want the dynamic range to be tight or you will miss a lot of music.
DATA COMPRESSION (compress the amount of disk storage used)
After mixing and mastering, you can make a mix that takes up about half the file size by compressing the data in the file, same as making a Zip archive. This is what computer people think of when you say compression. The bit stream that the player sees is the same as raw audio, but on disk it is compressed data.
LOSSY COMPRESSION (compress the amount of playback bandwidth required)
Finally, you can encode a mix into a lossy format, and the encoder will throw data away in order to compress the bandwidth the file requires to play in real-time. This is how MP3 and MP4 do it. This is what video people think of when you talk about compression, because this is also how DV and many other video-related formats keep their file sizes low enough to be practical.
Aside from the fact that there seems to be a mistaken conflation above between data compression and dynamics compression (big difference. BIG difference. No less problematic, but still...different topics) Compression and limiting get a bad rap.
They're extraordinarily useful tools in engineering and in mastering, when used judiciously. Adding a nice bit of compression to an overall mix can give you a little warmth (given something like a good opto compressor or something) and a little extra sonic "smear" to sort of glue things together. It's difficult to explain because it's really sort of an aesthetic choice. And limiting can even thougs out a bit over the course of an album, because most performances aren't going to be at the exact same levels all the time.
Compressors and limiters like this aren't always the easiest to use, either. The mastering multibands particularly are surgically precise - you can go from enhancing a track to destroying with just a few slight modifications. They're very, very powerful tools for tweaking a recording for playback on a variety of systems - after all, what sounds great on a set of high-end, flat-response studio monitors may not sound as great in a Honda Civic or in a big boomy dance club.
Problem is, all that power's gotten abused. Digital limiters with lookahead and adaptive release curves mean you can push the gain a lot hotter without the nasty artifacts of overcompression, and anybody who calls themselves a mastering engineer can slam something though Waves L2, squish the life out of it, but make it the hottest thing around. This tech is also no longer just available to people with the dosh to put together a mastering studio - a few hundred bucks can put it in the hands of a local band with dreams of radio stardom and zero background in that phase of production. That's been just as bad for the loudness wars as big mastering houses willing to bend over for the big labels marketing whims.
All these tools can be used for good - to clean up and smooth out an erratic recording, to punch up the drums a little bit on a dance track, to basically make sure that you can hear the album in your car as well as your home stereo or a club.
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"I used to listen to Null Device before they sold out."
Just add a byte or two of "forced volume" value to each track. That way producers wouldn't have to clip the sound, but would still have it played loud. I.e. the clipping would occur at play time, not recording time, and audiophiles can get all the dynamic range they need.
That would mean, of course, that it's yet another change to the CD standard, but that one has been violated so many times already that noone would notice.