Quote:
Originally Posted by Hog
Hi,
I was wondering if this looks a bit clipped? If it is, what do I need to do?
Cheers
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You're asking because of the obvious limited look to the waveforms right?
You can trust the metering in Reaper and you can always zoom in on the waveforms to have a look if you still don't.
Get familiar with the mastered levels that are in use nowadays.
More classy stuff (and the actual eventual goal for ALL music) = -16 LUFS
The place where most stuff is landing right now that isn't volume war hyped = -13 LUFS
Most streaming services are normalizing to -12 LUFS (Louder gets simply turned down, quieter gets turned up. Their sources are usually the volume war CDs from the last decade so there isn't much turning up going on. And that's where the shrill sound most often comes from. Treble eq slamming comes along with volume war levels quite often.)
CDs are usually still mastered to hit between -13 LUFS and -10 LUFS. (-13 being no extra boost. Same as the 24 bit master)
Volume war CDs are -9 LUFS to -6 LUFS and these usually have a painful treble eq boost as well. That's the shrill sound everyone is familiar with and often blames on the CD format. (Neither 44.1k sample nor 16 bit sample format does that. It's a big crude eq boost done intentionally.)
So...
Set the volume of your system to where -16 to -13 LUFS sounds loud enough and full enough. Then mix. Your ear will tell you when to turn things down. If something actually starts clipping when it still isn't loud enough, that's when you need to break out the compressor or limiter and knock down some peaks to get it under control. Or maybe something completely different like discovering some low rumble that really moves the meters and eq'ing that out.
If you were to set your monitor listening volume for a volume war treble slammed CD, you'd end up setting that volume pretty low! Now it will be almost impossible to mix. Stuff would be still too quiet and red clip lights are already going off. The volume war hype is done after the mix.
You can get more critical with calibrating monitoring levels (and people do). The above will get you in the ballpark just fine.