Best Export Settings - Why Does My Mix Sound Bad After Exporting? - FL Studio

hello and welcome back to another video this is gonna be a super quick video we're just gonna show two things the first thing is how to export in FL Studio just to make sure that your export settings are all good and the second thing is going to be talking about why sometimes when you export from FL Studio if you then listen back on your computer it sounds completely different how it sounded in FL Studio there's lots of people who they're mixed sounds awesome inside FL Studio they export it and then they listen on their computer and it actually sounds really bad the low end is terrible the high end sounds really like sharp but not clear and defined this happened to us when we started making music and there are a few things you could do to fix this so let's just get straight into it so starting with the first part of this video how to export your song or your mix or your master in FL Studio it will change depending on where you want to distribute your song if you want to put it on a CD your export settings might be a little bit different too if you want to put it on to Spotify I've left some links in the description giving some good advice about what sort of settings to use for specific streaming sites but just generally this should get you a good export from FL Studio so the first thing you want to do is press ctrl + highlight the length of your song just by left clicking and dragging so this is just a really short audio demo for the sake of this tutorial but it's five bars long then what you want to do is go up to file you want to go to export and then just choose WAV file for now give it whatever file name you want to give it I'm just gonna call it export one and then this rendering dialog box pops up so I'll tell you the name that'll be exported to and we'll just sort of go through this start to finish so basically the first thing is mode song selection or pattern we want to export the whole song so just make sure that's on song it will give you a little bit of information under here how many bars it is how long it is usually if the total time if that is like 20 minutes long or something it's a good indication that you've probably selected the wrong amount of space something like that it'll also tell you how much space it's gonna take up on your computer then there's this tail option here and this is pretty important so I'll flash up a little picture here showing what this does but basically this chooses whether it cuts the audio exactly where you've told it to cut whether it leaves the remainder and just sort of like fades it out say there's a reverb it will keep on exporting until the reverb dies away to a certain value that's very very small it will wrap the remainder so sometimes if you're exporting like a beat loop or something it actually starts at the end and wraps the decaying tail at the start so that you can loop things forever and that's not what you'd want for a song usually we would choose cut remainder if we were mastering sometimes you can do leave remainder if you're mixing because you might want to just export all those reverb tails off and let a mastering engineer or yourself fade it away manually in mastering but for now I'm going to keep it to cut remainder because that's what I use nine times out of ten because I like to choose precisely where it finishes this section here lets you choose what format now we already chose WAV file when we went to the file menu but you could still choose an mp3 or a different sort of file that WAV file is going to give you the best sound quality it's what's recommended 99 times out of 100 but it does depend what streaming site you're going to put on put it on or whether you're putting it onto an mp3 player or whatever but WAV file is what we do the way the bit-depth if you're going to put it onto a CD you'll want to have this as 16 bit but 24-bit is widely accepted across some sort of all streaming sites and most most mediums but again you should maybe check the links in the description and see what's gonna fit best for you 24-bit and 32-bit are gonna give you a really high quality for sort of archiving your files and really high-quality mix down even if you want to reduce the bit depth later you can keep it high for now all of these options down here will be grayed out in certain settings so if I open up mp3 you can see that the wave bit depth has grade itself out because it just doesn't mean anything you can actually still change it which is a bit strange but it doesn't mean anything in this case sort of an option is greyed out you just don't even need to worry about it now we're on to quality now for this you want to put it pretty much as high as possible the only reason you'd want to go lower is if your computer is not really very good and it would take you a very very long time to explore and that was a problem so if you had it on six point it's gonna make sport an awful lot quicker than 512 point but anything above 64 is gonna be awesome 512 is probably overkill but we just try to make sure we get as much quality there as possible you want to make sure that both of these options here are checked and during option only lights up if you're on 16-bit depending on whether you want a dithered 16-bit output or not but usually at the end of our mastering chain whether we're using ozone or we're using our slate digital limiter it will do the dithering for us in that process and we control the dithering there so we tend to leave this dithering unchecked because it's not important for our specific uses but if you weren't and you were doing 16-bit you might want to dither it just to make sure that it's all gonna be okay just a note some of these options might be hidden to you you'll have to press these little down keys to make sure that you get all the options available in this tab down here the three most important things are trim PDC delay to make sure that the plug-in delay compensation is working and everything stays in time it can add a little bit of time just before your song or remove a tiny little bit but it's only going to be a fraction of a second the next one is enable master effects you want to make sure all of your master effects are on unless your mastering engineers told you to turn them all off and you want to have enable insert effects so that all of your delays reverbs EQ compression is all working at this point you have two options you can choose background rendering or start start we'll start the render and you'll get to see the progress up here and then the start button will change to an abort button in case you want to cancel what you're doing if you choose background rendering you could close FL Studio and go and do something else on your computer or go on the internet or something like that whilst it's rendering it frees up the computer but it's gonna take a little bit longer to render because it's not using all of your computer's resources so I'm gonna go on press start and you'll see the progress bar moving just like that and then often I'll open up a file explorer and I'll drag the file back in just to make sure that it's the right length and the nothing's clip it all distort it or anything like that just to quickly show you what I meant about the dithering settings in Slate FGX which is one of the limiters we use it has a differing option and then I just go into the settings and I'll choose the resolution and and the output setting so stuff like that inside this so that I don't have to worry about FL studio handling those I have full control over them so that's the first part of this video done now we're going to look at why your audio sometimes sounds bad outside of FL Studio after you've exported it so what's this all about well basically there are thousands and thousands of people online and myself who when we started with FL Studio we exported something it sounded great inside FL Studio but then we played it back on our computer either on like Windows Music Player or like groove music or something like that just the inbuilt media player on the computer and it just sounded awful like the bass was non-existent the high end was really like fatiguing and brittle but it didn't sound clear and everything just sounded Phase II and terrible and it causes people to just stress out there's huge forums online talking about ways to fix it and all the problems but what I found from our own experience and looking online is that 99% of the time it's the fault of your computer's inbuilt audio processing and the media player enhancements that you're using even after being told that I was convinced it was something else and it was some skill I had or didn't have that was causing the problem and I kept looking for fixes in the mix or in in mastering to try and fix what was going on but in reality it was actually just the audio settings on the player so I'll show you what I mean I'll just open up groove music and I happen to have the settings open but somewhere on here there'll be a settings option in this case it's down here and there might be something like an equalizer and the equalizer might have some sort of cut or some sort of boost or something like that and might be messing with it and the same things true whether you have Windows Media Player beats Media Player or something they've all got enhancements or stereo widening usually these are turned on by default so you just want to make sure that all of those are turned off but then sometimes the computer just doesn't sound good like on my laptop where we started making music it sounded great in FL Studio but we never had an audio interface so we were using the azio for all settings inside FL Studio but then when we laughed and we were listening to the music on Windows Media Player it was using the realtek audio drivers and no matter what I did and no matter how many times I updated them or reinstalled and these real tech drivers always sounded rubbish and I was so worried that that would be what it would sound like for everyone else but then when I took that song and put it on my phone and listened in headphones it sounded great or if I listened in the car it sounded absolutely amazing and if I plugged an audio interface into the laptop and bypassed its own settings and its own audio management settings it sounded awesome again basically the take home is that don't be too worried about your own skills if this is happening it's probably not your fault if you click export and you followed these sorts of settings and then your song ends up sounding like a complete garbage it's probably not because you were mixing something wrong in FL Studio if it sounds very different inside FL Studio and outside it's probably a fault in your hardware or software on the computer you're using I'll leave some links in the description that hopefully can give some sorts of very specific fixes or maybe links to where you could get new drivers or something like that but try not to worry about it being your own skills it's likely just a technical problem and that's what I see in the resolution in most of these forums usually it's just a technical problem and it's not your own skills so hopefully this video has been helpful I do have a video showing how to export all the stems in your project with or without effects if you were going to send it to like a mixing or a mastering engineer so I'll link that video just here in a moment thank you very much for watching and I'll see you in the next video bye for now you

Channel: In The Mix

Views: 596,172

Rating: 4.943315 out of 5

Keywords: best export settings, fl studio, best fl studio export, export settings, fl studio export, how to export, wav file, fl studio wav or mp3, Fl Studio 12 tutorial, lesson, mix sounds bad after export, export quality is bad, bad sound after export, FL Studio 20 export

Id: 0rEnGUUJ5oA

Length: 10min 12sec (612 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 13 2018