Mastering material (on Mac or Hardware..)

rlorentz · Joined: Aug 13, 2008 Posts: 16 Location: Washington, DC

You would think this would be some kind of no-brainer. I've been working on the problem for a year or so with no good workflow or good tool really.

Here's where I start:

Electronic/acoustic material mixed down on my Mackie 1604 (not perfectly, would be nicer with sweeping eq's etc) and recorded on my Hi-MD, full PCM quality 44.1khz 16bit. Material copied to my mac as .wav

What I want to do:

Amplitude adjustments, different types of eq for different purposes (general graphic eq, parametric eq; clean up acoustic recordings, add emphasis to material, etc).

Why I'm failing:

Not sure! The only tool I have used that's good at all has been audacity. I like it's amplitude adjustments a fair amount, using envelopes is intuitive and works well. But working with the EQ I find to be pretty miserable. It would be good if I knew what curves I wanted to apply and wanted to do it in batch to many recordings or something. That's NOT what I am doing. I want to be able to go through and do a lot of experimentation (in real time would be awesome) to find what really brings a track to life and sounds solid. Right now that's a very cumbersome and sloppy process and just makes me get frustrated 90% of the time and give up on making my stuff sound good.

I understand many recording experts would say "no eq is the best eq" and all this, fine, but they work in a different world than an electronic musician and I see the coloration of filters as a positive aspect. I'm trying to create alien soundscapes, not keep purity of an artist's voice.

Where to go:

A piece of software to do this would be great (Mac). Really great. I've looked at "mastering" software but it's all crap - most don't even have EQ and are for "mastering to CD". Whatever. I don't use a computer for any part of my studio, but mastering on it is fine.

I always think about moving to hardware. However, I can't see a clean way to do it. I could take the recording and somehow play it back (maybe burn to CD and play out there? ugh) and EQ it like that and rerecord (bounce it basically). That doesn't seem so great for many sonic and hassle reasons, though. I could try adding EQ in a final recording stage (bus insert on my mixer).. but, that's uncool because it may take full concentration and a set of hands to work those EQ controls, while my hands will already be tied up making the track. Ideal but not practical......

Hopefully you guys can straighten me out here Smile

elektro80 · Posted: Sun Aug 31, 2008 7:15 am Post subject:

I think you can leave the mastering software angle for now. You really want to do detail editing and real time tweaks and this is part of the workflow that comes before final mastering. Audacity? Do you have any reasonably full equipped DAW software on your Mac? If you are considering standalone hardware instead then obviously you have some sort of a budget and the price of say Logic Studio 8 is far lower than any decent mastering rack or console analog/digital hybrid thingie anyway. Logic Pro also comes bundled with a standalone audio editor which is more like Audacity on steroids and then some.

And: turn your projects into 44.1 khz/24 bit projects. The increased sample size will give you some needed overhead when doing processing and such.

rlorentz · Joined: Aug 13, 2008 Posts: 16 Location: Washington, DC

Thanks for the thoughts

I think I'm actually sorted now, BIAS Peak looks like it's geared to do what I want with realtime VST's and is a product I had been looking at a bit before.

elektro80 · Posted: Sun Aug 31, 2008 10:03 am Post subject:

BIAS Peak is very good indeed.

donpaterson

I am using Amadeus Pro from Martin Hairer (Hairersoft) along with free AU, VST plug ins and finally a TC Powercore Firewire with the included amazing plug ins.

When I finish a ProTools session (mixed in-the-box to a stereo track), I export the mixed track to the desktop.( I am sure this will work with most multitrack DAWs.) Then I import the 'raw' WAVE file into Amadeus for editing, normalizing, 'top and tail with fades to dig. black' etc. The free 'Stereo Tools' from Fluxhome.com is very useful to monitor and adjust the stereo image. I use the TC X3 3 band 'Finalizer' in the Powercore to adjust the 3 band Expansion, Compression, and Limiting to my client's requirements. Then I use 'Waveform Statistics' in Amadeus Pro to check for 'overs, DC offset, peak and average levels'. This info makes the dupe guys happy.

Hope this helps?

don