How to make audio louder | Getting a Louder Mix - tame peaks in Audacity | Audacity Limiter

hey folks Glenn here I just want toh go through a little bit uh about mastering and adding a master limiter to your mix I'm using audacity a free audio editor I'm using version 1310 and uh I've just been sent a uh a mix here from Neil Mack who I'm working with on a mix uh of a an original tune that he did called Made of Stone a pretty cool bluesy number and what I'm going to do is just bring that into audacity I right click on the file and open with and audacity and that brings the track in and by looking at the track I can see that there's no clipping so that's good and um I also see that there are some peaks in the file which are more than the average amount uh in the file for instance this one here and here's another one here so what we're going to do is we're just going to uh see what the average volume of this file is so I'm just going to select just a you know a regular part of the file hit uh effect go into left click amplify it wants to come up by 3.7 in order to get to zero cancel hit another part of the file this part of the file wants to come up 5.1 to get to zero and this one here this section wants to get to 3.5 to get to zero and uh let's just take a look at this one 2.9 so about 3db so the average looks like it's about 3db to get to zero however uh when we look at Peaks for instance like uh well we'll take select the whole file left click on a blank space here and we can select the whole file effect left click amplify left click and it the whole file is only 0.3 below zero so we cancel that and let's find out what is 0.3 below Z which is almost click uh clipping so I'm going to select this part that's quite loud I can see it's quite big and hit the plus sign that Zooms in on that section and just left click and scroll across that and select it again plus sign and left click and scroll on that just to get the peak there it is there you can see it's almost going over so if we look at it effect left click amplify left click 0.3 of a DB below zero is all that is so what I want to do is I want to lower that Peak so that it falls in line with what the rest of the average of that file is so if I take my gain tool amplify and we lower it by 0.8 of a DB that's less than 1 DB and the reason why I do that is because the smallest amount of volume change that humans hear is 1 DB so if I select 0.8 of a DB that's less than one and it'll make it uh um very smooth in transition as far as any volume changes go won't be detectable by the human ear and I click okay and then I'm going to select a little larger area of the file like so and I'm going to repeat that last action by clicking controlr and that will reduce the gain by 0.8 of a DB as well and do it one more time controlr and now we'll see what our new Peak is amplify and it's 2.7 to get to zero so it's right in the ballpark so we've lowered that clip now we're going to continue doing that for the the rest of the file and find all those little Peak Peaks that are above 3db and any Peaks that are above 3db you want to find those and you want to get them down so they're approximately 3db this one's only at 1.1 so what I'm going to do is zoom in on it zoom in zoom in zoom in and left click drag that zoom in some more until I can see just the peak and there's that Transit Peak as you can see it almost hits zero go to effect left click go to amplify left click reduce the gain so it's below zero I want minus 0.8 of a DB minus 0.8 that brings our new Peak down to minus 1.9 click okay I'm going to do that one more time on that Peak click controlr and that new Peak now let's just see on the amplify tool wants to go 2.7 that's perfect and we'll do that now for the rest of the entire file we'll find all the Peaks and lower them all and now say we've uh gone through all the different Peaks and what we're going to do is um two things we can in order to save that amount of work what we can do is controll D and that'll duplicate my entire file for me controll D and now I can apply the master to just this file this one has been tweaked and have the Peaks released so I if I want I can rename that on the track and I can just call that reduced Peaks and then if I need to get back to that file I can do that and that'll save it as so now I can mute that track and go down to this one and select the uh file and then go to effect left click on it I'm going to go down to my kajar house Master limiter and we're going to put the master limiter on this track to tame any of those Peaks and it's also going to raise the overall uh volume and perceived loudness of the track click on classic Master limiter it's set by default for master CD setting and it raises the gain of the file by about 5db on that setting and what I'm going to do is click okay and that will raise the overall gain of this track by 5 DB so as we're waiting for that to process um and just want to let you know that as we go through the uh mastering proc process what we're doing is trying to get the Peaks to be uh lowered without uh dropping them out completely because that does uh add to the Dynamics the trents um do matter as far as audio content goes so you don't want to delete all those Peaks you just want to lower them and tame them so that it's not so hard on the on the uh limiter so now you see that the limiting has been done and it's raised the file and by default it raises the file to just below zero so that there's no clipping but it makes it as loud as it possibly can so if we select the entire file and then go to our uh effect menu left click go to our amplifier uh amplify tool and we're going to see what the new Peak is just to show you and it shows that it's 0.2 of a DB to get to zero which is almost hitting zero so I I'm what I'm going to do is lower the overall gain of that track so that we have some Headroom in the file I'm going to lower it by 2db and uh what I like to do is lower it by 2db that brings my new Peak now to minus 2.2 DB I click okay and that's going to make the whole file now so the Peaks are only at minus 2.2 DB but it's raised the overall volume of the uh track for instance we'll just look at what the uh RMS is of the old track and I'll I'll just select a portion of it here by zeroing in go to a loud part of the track select it left click on effect I'm going to go down to my Vox Ango span and we're just going to uh see what that looks like on the um on the uh uh on the meters and we end up with uh an RMS of approximately 16 to 17 DB below zero and I'm going to cancel that select the same one now on the on the limited track and let's see what it reads and it reads a lot louder that's now minus 14 DB which is right in the ballpark for a blues number for RMS so there we go we now know that our RMS has been boosted we're at aboutus 14 DB and we now have a mastered track so there we go and uh that's a tuned by neac Made of [Music] Stone

Channel: Audacity Tutorials

Views: 59,761

Keywords: Screencast-O-Matic.com, audacity, limiter, taming peaks, louder mix, home recording, Mastering

Id: eOzumOiU5U8

Length: 9min 26sec (566 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 17 2013