What does it mean to “master for iTunes?” Apple tripped that question with the launch of a suite of utilities and sound-processing algorithms intended to master music for their codecs and software, rather than more generically as would be done with the CD. More significantly, what does it mean that an increasing number of music listeners experience all music through Apple’s software as the final gateway to their ears? In our first look at this issue, we welcome guest writer and producer Primus Luta (David Dodson). He tests this issue the only way that really matters: with his ears.

There’s so much to say, in fact, that almost each line here of David’s conclusions is up for potential discussion and debate. That to me isn’t a red flag for posting – quite the opposite, it’s an invitation. So we consider this the beginning, not the end, of this conversation. -PK

The announcement of Apple’s new Mastered for iTunes suite caught me at a serendipitous time, as I prepped the first release on my new label.  In fact, the day of the announcement came right in the midst of reviewing masters for the release.  It’s an interesting situation for a compilation release, in which styles range from ambient to muddy beats.  Finding a good balance that keeps them all flowing together is an art in and of itself.  But it would seem Apple has that all solved with their Master for iTunes droplet.  Drag the high-quality files to the droplet, and presto-chango — out come files that all play perfectly in iTunes.

Well, that’s the claim, but is it mastering or encoding?  To their credit, in the documentation Apple explains that their 32-bit process manages to encode from high-res audio without leaving a dithered footprint.  Ed.: “Dithering” is the addition of adding small amounts of noise to compensate for errors that can occur in downsampling from greater bit depth to less – it’s used in image processing as well as in sound. According to Apple, their use of greater bit depth in the intermediary file prevents aliasing and clipping, and thus they don’t need to use dithering. -PK Apple’s tools aren’t the only way to do this. Most pro audio editors can achieve the same, but often people are ripping MP3s or AACs in their media players, so it is an important distinction.  It still begs the question: why go down to CD specifications,  especially while making the point of noting their process results in a quality better than CD’s or CD rips? Ed.: The greater bit-depth is only an intermediary file; eventually delivery is not only compressed, but at specifications set by the CD. Greater resolution and bit depth are limited to the mastered files, not to what the listener ultimately hears.

The most important question, though, is how does it sound?  If you send a song to be mastered, you expect in general to get back a song that sounds different than the one with which you started.  Generally, this difference is in perceived overall volume, but also can include changes to dynamics and other touches.  So what changes does the Master for iTunes droplet make to your files?  Well, none: it just encodes them.  They describe the process as such:

The Droplet creates an AAC audio file from an AIFF or WAVE source file by first generating a CAF (Core Audio File) rendered with an iTunes sound check profile applied to the file. If the sample rate of the source file is greater than 44.1 kHz, it’s downsampled to 44.1 kHz using our mastering-quality SRC. Next, it uses this newly-rendered CAF to render a high-quality AAC audio file. Once the final AAC audio file is generated, the intermediary CAF is deleted.

The key part relating to how your files sound is the “iTunes sound check profile applied to the file.”  Rather than changing the volume gain in the file, metadata information is used to tell the playback device how to play it.  What the documentation does not tell you is what or how this information is determined.

Reviewing masters involves listening on many different systems.  I like to listen on studio monitors, a small boombox, a consumer surround sound theatre system, laptop speakers, desktop computer with headphones and, of course, in a portable media player with various headphones.  I’ve also added a cloud-based stream to that mix — and doing that is what brought me to the experiment I conducted.

I uploaded a test master to the the cloud and was comparing listening to it and iTunes, when I noticed a rather huge discrepancy in volume.  At first, I figured they were just set to different levels, but upon checking both were at their max.  So I went to play my reference song, which currently is the title track from Monolake’s new album Ghosts (I tend to try to keep my reference material relatively contemporary.)  The volumes on this track between applications were more or less the same.  Meanwhile, my test master, which was playing pretty much on par with the Monolake track from the cloud, played significantly lower in iTunes.

That was when I remembered Sound Check.  I wasn’t on my normal listening computer and never bothered to see if Sound Check had been enabled, but sure enough, when I looked the preference was checked.

Ed.: I actually had some difficulty getting a solid answer, but consulting with Apple-following journalist Jim Dalrymple of The Loop, we believe that the default setting is off in iTunes for Mac and Windows and on iOS. If someone has a different answer to this, I’d love to hear it. What you can tell about it is what Apple has documented in support document HT2425, namely, Sound Check operates track-by-track, not album-by-album, operates in the background, and computes and stores non-destructive normalization information in ID3 tags. It works exclusively with .mp3, .AAC, .wav, and .aiff file types, and gain increases occur before the built-in iTunes Limiter. That also means you should consider the iTunes Limited as part of this process.

As soon as I disabled it, the volume was consistent across players.  This inspired me to test how Sound Check was affecting other files, and so, going through my iTunes library, I built up a sample set of 25 songs to test the effects of Sound Check:

- = Sound Check turned down the volume
+ = Sound Check turned up the volume
null = Sound Check had no effect on volume

This was all done by ear, and while my ears aren’t what they used to be, I’m willing to guess if you tested, your results would be similar.  Ed.: You should also be able to investigate the actual ID3 data, but in this case, perceived volume may be more interesting anyway, and the effect isn’t necessarily subtle.

About halfway through, I thought it’d be good to confirm these findings with numerical tests, but then I started noticing a pattern.  Almost everything gets turned down, some more extremely than others — the most extreme example being the Nine Inch Nails track.  The two tracks that get turned up are both archival recordings, and so it makes sense that they are at a lower volume.  The vinyl rip from Pharoah Sanders would likely have gotten turned down, as well, save for the fact that vinyl rips are re-mastered to raise their volumes.  Same goes for the live Stevie Wonder boot.

The stand-outs are the ones which Sound Check has no affect on, each of which was released within the last two years. The Tori Amos track comes from her last orchestral album.  Because of the result, I tested two other selections by her on either side of the advances of digital technology, both of which get turned down.  The track “Blood Roses,” like “Night of the Hunters,” features no drums but still gets turned down, as the mixing for the album is definitely rock-influenced and so the harpsichord falls on the loud side.

Stellar OM Source’s track is of the ambient drone variety, also without drums.  But the Monolake track is techno, full of drums and crunching distortions, yet it remained unaffected by Sound Check. (It’s also worth noting that the Powell track, which also has prominent drums, is only barely turned down by Sound Check.)  Because “Ghosts” is one of my reference tracks, I had previously done an analysis of it. I noted that, despite peaking at the max of 0 dB, its RMS only averages out at -14.5 dB.  I’ve done this type of analysis for a number of modern tracks and this is unusually low.  Typically, drum- and bass- heavy tracks manage to hit around -10 dB RMS with some going as high as -6 dB RMS.

The results for the Monolake track led me to hypothesize that what Sound Check was actually doing was applying an RMS limit on tracks of around -15 dB (with a +/- that I haven’t calculated yet).  Anything below that gets turned up and anything above that gets turned down (with the precaution that turning up never results in clipping by going above the 0 dB max).  This was confirmed when I normalized one of my test master’s to an RMS of -15 dB.  This version of the track, when played in iTunes with Sound Check enabled, played at the same volume as with Sound Check disabled.

Where an object of mastering is to create a version of a song which plays at the optimum level across playback devices, where iTunes is understood as rapidly becoming a primary application for playback, and where Sound Check is often enabled as a preference in iTunes, it stands to reason that those producing masters today should be working to create versions of songs for which Sound Check does not need change the levels.  As such, mastering for iTunes can be understood as creating a quality master which has an average RMS of -15 dB.

Prior to this, the primary barrier for the levels of a master was the 0 dB max limit to prevent clipping.  Within that, the RMS levels could fall anywhere, which is the freedom that gave way to the loudness wars. The so-called “loudness wars” refer to the increase in compression to produce greater perceived loudness, as tracked over the rise of big FM radio and the CD through the 80s, 90s, and today.  Two songs with a max of 0 dB can have extreme differences in volume based on the RMS.  Production and mixing tricks, especially with the heavy use of dynamics processors like compressors, can squash a song, allowing the overall volume to be raised incredibly.  Using these techniques, it’s entirely possible to create a mix (not a master) which has a max level of -4 dB but an RMS of -10 dB.  If you master that track, raising the max, to 0 dB, the RMS level will push close to -6 dB.  When this file is played in iTunes with Sound Check enabled, however, it’s going to be turned down to -15 dB RMS which will be below the -4 dB max level that it started with.

The potential of adopting this as a standard is an end to the loudness wars as we’ve known them.  As the above example shows, doing everything you can to push a song to the max ends up having the opposite effect.  So rather than worry about loudness, producers and mixing engineers can return to focusing on getting good, clean mixes of songs.  Mastering engineers can also worry less about pushing the volume to the max and focus on bringing the best out of the mixes.

Incidentally, the system for producing tracks that comply to this have long existed in the mastering world, thanks to Bob Katz and the K system of level metering.  Using the K-14 system of metering for mastering (and producing and mixing) can ensure that engineers are not pushing their mixes too loud.

There are, however, some negatives which can be attributed to the adoption of such a standard.  Because of the headroom afforded by digital, in the last decade, the creative use of volume has increased.  ”Loud” has new musical meaning, and the tools utilized to maximize loudness normally in mastering are being introduced during production to create effects.  An example of this is the pumping effect of side-chain compression on drums.  This can be quite appealing creatively even when (and perhaps because) it pushes to levels of distortion.  Creating this effect without clipping is easily managed with a limiter at the end of the signal chain.  However, creating this effect below -15 dB is not so straightforward, and the results won’t necessarily be the same.

For the mastering of multi-song projects there are other issues.  Over the course of an album, dynamic shifts between songs can help to carry the mood of the project.  One wouldn’t necessarily want all of the tracks to have the same -15 dB RMS; ideally, that would be reserved for the loudest song and the others mixed under that accordingly.   It presents a challenge, but it is manageable.  What’s nice about this type of limit is that, unlike the 0 dB max limitation, going over it does not necessarily result in destructive clipping, so there’s still a dynamic range within which to work.  It’s also worth noting that the Sound Check process can be applied to an album to ensure consistency in listening.

One has to hope that, should this become a standard, new creative ways of working within these parameters will be born.  To be clear, -15 dB RMS, while not the loudest, can sound great for a great mix.  Just listen to the Monolake track if you want proof.  Getting people to adopt to it is a challenge, but I think the incentive to adopt will be there once artists realize that the more they push the volume, like their mother, the more Sound Check will turn the volume down.

As a footnote, I thought to test how Sound Check treated what was previously considered the most perfect album from a mixing mastering perspective – Steely Dan’s Aja.  In iTunes, Sound Check turns “Peg” down.  So it’s not just your bass heavy-beats that could be affected by this.  Also, it’s not just iTunes and not just Sound Check.  Replay Gain is a similar tool found in other media players.  Spotify also has similar limiting for its streaming services.  These things will likely show up in more playback applications as time goes on so adopting to this now is a pretty safe bet.  Sure, your tracks may not sound the loudest when tested without these services, but with good mixes, they will still sound good, regardless. “Good” is far more important than “loud.”

I’m still on the fence, though.  In general, I’m not a fan of auto volume control.  Adopting a mastering standard that caters to them just seems wrong, even if I am (for the most part) on the side of ending the loudness wars.  And, again, on the creative side, I’m very concerned.  A decade of loudness wars in many ways has changed our sense of sound possibilities, and signals pushed into the red — well, I kind of like those, when they’re done creatively.  People talking about the loudness wars are usually talking about traditional rock and pop music being squashed and absent of dynamics.  But we’re at a point now where there are other genres for whom pushing into the red can be seen as more valuable than dynamic range.  It’s a completely different school of thought and need not be shut down (or turned down) because of an antiquated sense of norm.

You can follow David Dodson on Twitter. http://twitter.com/#!/primusluta

We’re interested to hear what you think.

Mastering – a step by step guide to good sound by monolake

Sadly, as Robert Henke concedes:

i still think it needs to be louder and it lacks dynamics and punch. I STILL THINK IT NEEDS TO BE LOUDER AND IT LACKS DYNAMICS AND PUNCH!

It’s like banging your head against a brick wall.

No further comment at this time.

Universal Audio has long had a successful business selling hardware DSP effects, many of them carefully-modeling classic analog gear. These products use dedicated DSP hardware for number-crunching, requiring that you connect an extra box to your computer. UA has certainly had their loyalists, and for fans of the products, the dedicated gear is simply a convenient way to get all of these sound-processing goodies. But it’s fair to ask the question, as many producers have who read this site, what’s the advantage? Why not simply use native processing on your computer?

Apollo, UA’s new hardware, answers that question more emphatically. By integrating the processing prowess of the UA platform into a high-quality audio interface, you can now add UA effects live, as you record and mix, with extreme low latencies. UA reports latencies below a couple of milliseconds. That’s possible, theoretically, on a desktop computer, but not generally on a laptop and very often not with any real reliability. You can do it in a lab, but it’s not something typical users see.

So, in one box, you effectively get your whole studio: the audio interface, the DSP power, and real low-latency sound processing. It’s not the first audio interface with DSP, but it might be the most compelling case yet for why that combination make sense.

And here’s where things get interesting: via Thunderbolt, a single MacBook Air, costing just around $1000, could be your whole studio machine. And while Apollo runs a couple grand above that, that means the total price tag is stunningly low compared to what you’d pay just a short time ago.

UA briefed me earlier this week on the technology. Even as NAMM raves about iPads, you begin to see the real power of conventional computers. Steve Jobs once compared those computers to “trucks” – while quietly leading a company that profits on how cool trucks are, too. With an Air, adding only slightly to the weight of an iPad and at only twice the cost, you can connect to vastly greater native processing power, greater outboard processing power, and greater I/O. And now with Thunderbolt, you could connect a high-res display or two, a big, fast hard drive, and the audio interface, all without running out of power or impacting performance. (No, seriously – you can. The reason you haven’t seen this in action is that we haven’t had the hardware to show it off. Apollo will be a compelling case for that.)

All of this is academic until you actually have something to do with sound. So, UA is also expanding their developer platform to additional outside development; more on that soon.

Apollo isn’t for everyone; obviously, some people won’t like being tied to hardware, and native plug-ins do work for a lot of people. But it does solve problems for many potential producer customers by making something reliable, predictable, low-latency, extensible with lots of excellent processing tools, and all in one single-box solution.

Apollo will initially be Mac-only, but will come to Windows, too – and with more PCs supporting Thunderbolt in 2012, that means the MacBook is far from your only choice. So, you’ve got one add-on that’s your interface, your pres, and your mix/master/effect toolbox.

More specs:

• 18 x 24 FireWire/Thunderbolt-ready audio interface, 24-bit/192 kHz
• “Premium” mic pres – UA stresses that they’re also building on their mic pre reputation, and they claim the “lowest THD and highest dynamic range” in their class
• Dedicated front-panel controls: preamp gain, channel selection, mic pad, +48V phantom power, low cut, monitor level, and dual headphone controls.
• 4 digitally-controlled analog mic preamps, 8 balanced line inputs and outputs, dual front-panel JFET DIs, digitally-controlled analog monitor outputs, 8 channels of ADAT, 2 channels of S/PDIF, word clock I/O, FireWire 800 (standard), and a Thunderbolt expansion bay — making it a well-equipped centerpiece for the modern project studio.
• Core Audio drivers; ASIO coming, so you can use this with your DAW of choice
• Console application and plug-in for recalling all your interface and plug-in settings at once
• UAD-2 acceleration
• Analog emulation plug-ins from Ampex, Lexicon, Manley, Neve, Roland, SSL, Studer, etc.
• Thunderbolt will be available on a sold-separately Option Card; UA says it reduces latency and audio buffer sizes, improves high sample-rate performance, and allows greater UAD plug-in instances over FireWire.

Of course, because Thunderbolt also connects to FireWire devices, you don’t lose your FireWire investment. The only bad news is that you only get Thunderbolt here as an Option Card; I imagine we’ll eventually see UA ship Thunderbolt connections standard.

There are both two-core and four-core versions, powered by Analog Devices SHARC processors, running an estimated street of US$1999 and $2499, respectively. Apollo’s Thunderbolt Option Card will be shipping in the first half of 2012, with pricing TBD.

www.uaudio.com/apollo

Videos are available on the UA blog: http://www.uaudio.com/blog/apollo-intro-video

Windows 7 summer; 10.6 and 10.7 Mac OS X when it ships.

Software Images

Let’s get straight to it: Ozone has already established itself as a do-everything mastering tool. It’s a suite of interconnected modules handling frequency and dynamics, designed to work together in an integrated interface. It does so much, in fact, that it’s hard for an upgrade to do more, but Ozone 5 promises new sound and visual feedback that could further entrench this popular tool.

And that could explain how Ozone 5 stole the Audio Engineering Society trade show in New York. AES is a flurry of knobs, dials, and faders, but some of the major buzz we heard was just this single upgrade to the software. (CDM’s Marsha Vdovin was out on the floor, and the word “Ozone” kept cropping up.)

Ozone is eminently visual software, so a lot of what’s new you can glean just by looking through the screenshots. But there are sound improvements, as well, both in the standard Ozone and the spendier “Advanced” edition.

What’s new:

• Updated modules. iZotope says they’ve “refined” their DSP algorithms. (Let’s see, carry the one…) The idea is, existing modules should sound better. There’s a detailed list on the iZotope site – aside from more subtle changes, you’ll find very specific adjustments to how parameters are controlled and how they impact the sound. To give one example, there’s a …
• New Limiter. The latest version of iZotope’s “psychoacoustics-based” limiter in the Advanced edition has a new stereo link control for handling left and right separately or together, and new intelligent transient handling algorithms, among other improvements.
• Enhanced EQ. Analog-matching EQ models analog shelf modes and frequency response, matching is easier than before, as with other modules, you can use left/right separately, and now zoom and display stereo info in your spectrum. There’s also new variable-phase functionality.
• New Reverb. Yes, sometimes you use reverb when mastering. (A little light reverb can do wonders.) A new modeled reverb algorithm adds new models and spaces and gives you unique early reflection control, as well as “cross-mix” for stereo imaging.
• New UI, workflow. I’ll let you just see what this looks like, but suffice to say parameters and labels are better-organized to be friendlier to advanced and beginning users alike. Past versions of Ozone were sometimes pretty-but-counterintuitive; this looks a bit clearer. Of course, you might not notice while dazzled by the…
• Slick visual feedback. In the standard version, metering has been enhanced. In the Advanced version, you get slick 2D and 3D plots of your sound spectrum for the Meter Bridge and Meter Taps modules. They look awesome, yes, but I also think these kind of “alien world mountainscape” views can help you better visualize what’s happening in a sound, so there is a practical use, too.

And, of course, all of this means you can easily wow clients when mastering by showing them visualizations that look like Geordi LaForge is studying abnormal quasar activity from the deck of the Enterprise. Just try to avoid opening up a cosmic string-related time wrinkle while mastering.

(And yes, when you’re all alone and no one is looking over your shoulder, you can do something useful with it.)

Pricing: US$249 (€195); US$999 (€799) Advanced.

Why is Advanced so expensive? Well, each module is also an independent plug-in you can use in your host. With that in mind, this starts to look like a better deal – some terrific reverb, EQ, and dynamics you can use anywhere. You also get the Meter Bridge and Meter Tap for analysis, fancier 2D and 3D spectrographs, and more advanced loudness meters. On the other hand, the basic version will also work with your host and gives you the sound-processing functionality minus all those more sophisticated meters you might need.

This month, there’s also steeply discounted intro pricing: US$599 for Advanced, US$199 for the standard edition. Expires December 1.

Ozone 5 was announced last month, but is now shipping. An OpenGL 2-capable video card is required for the 3D visualizations, but nearly all machines now provide that (including most integrated chipsets, too).

Ozone 5 Product Page @iZotope

For a look at what this tool can do, here’s our friend and experienced mastering and mix engineer Danny Wyatt, talking about how he works with limiting. The new UI and meters are actually a lot clearer than what you see in the video, and offer some nice, new functionality. I can tell you, Danny is a fully-converted Ozone lover, having worked with him in the studio as he mastered my own album. He’s got a big toolset of other stuff, but Ozone is very often what the real work comes down to, and — I think I can say this, Danny — he’ll be happy to evangelize the tool if you talk to him.

This isn’t a review, mind – in fact, my only significant reservation is that Ozone is so slick, it could distract from the reality that good mastering probably doesn’t need it. A great mastering engineer can do wonders with a fairly simple tool and their ear – no wild visualizations required. (“Great mastering engineer,” also known as, “not me.”) But that same person may well appreciate the level of precision iZotope, working with algorithms they’ve developed entirely in-house, can provide.

We want your feedback, as always. Ozone users – what do you think?

Users of rival products – what’s your all-in-one mastering tool of choice, and why?

“It must be a Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.” -Arthur Dent, in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy

If you’re having any issue getting through your Thursday, it’s tough to beat some proper, good techno – the kind of techno anyone can love, even if they keep shouting about how they “hate” it.

Techno pioneer Carl Craig is still going strong, the kind of artist whose work seems to flow freely. He’s got the roots, having begun with Derrick May in Detroit, but he’s remained a font of new work and invention since, mixing his work with live and jazz music and even endeavoring to introduce young people to new music through a self-started not-for-profit. (Check the cat’s bio.) If you haven’t checked in with him lately, he’s touring … well, nearly everywhere, and is keeping the new sounds going through his Planet E label. Planet E turned ten earlier this year, accompanied by new a full-length and remix EPs, but here’s a quick test of what’s coming out of this label via SoundCloud.

Latest tracks by carlcraignet

I have Carl on the brain partly because I’ve learned King Britt (Saturn Never Sleeps) has new music with him. I owe King and SNS’ Rucyl Mills a good weekend hiding out during Tropical Storm Irene, where I got in to see King’s workflow – mixing MIDI with CV triggers, Mono/Poly with Maschine, analog sequencing with Ableton Live. (We maintained power through the storm. Can I please evacuate to a chilled-out studio session more often? I’m a very, very blessed person, and believe me, I’m grateful for those gifts, those moments.)

The resulting sound represents the best, most organic feel of the different generations we’ve seen of this music. Whereas once production was laborious, we now get to cherry-pick the most comfy tools, the looseness of live playing and analog gear twiddling and sequencing with the speed of a Maschine or Ableton setup on a laptop. And it comes out, with tracks that are improvisatory, relaxed, and naturally grooving. I think you can hear it in Carl’s new stuff, and I know I can hear it in King’s, having listened in and jammed as some things were made.

Remember handing burned CDs to DJs? In this case, Carl got hold of King’s tracks and King of Carl via email and Twitter.

For a glimpse, see the informal video. (I shot some video of King, too, but want to wait to get his and Rucyl’s word on their collaboration. Oh, and I need to, like, upload it. I’ll just ask my extensive video production department to– doh!)

Give King’s upcoming tracks on Planet E a listen.

King Britt presents Dynamic – Secret of the Stars b/w Things Take Time by planetedetroit

Here’s a look inside the session (and yes, that is a KORG vocoder):

King’s been doing this a long while, and his craft I feel is razor sharp, which lets him keep those tracks feel as loose as they do. He talks about how he tunes tracks in the mastering process on the Universal Audio blog. He definitely lets his UA fan side show, but he also gets loads of mileage out of some specific UA plugs – and the basic techniques here you can easily apply to any mastering plug-ins you like. (Readers recently brought up the excellent and underrated Samplitude, which is also a good choice with its integrated mastering tools.)

Give King talking UA and mastering workflow a read:

King Britt on Mixing “Bit by Bit,” by Saturn Never Sleeps [Universal Audio Producers' Corner]

More, mailing lists and blogs and whatnot:

King Britt.com
http://planet-e.net/blog/
http://www.carlcraig.net/

You’ve heard the gripes, and heard and seen the somewhat unscientific demos. Now it’s time to examine the over-compression of music with – science! Earl Vickers of STMicroelectronics examines the Loudness Wars in an academic paper, as noted to us by reader photohounds.

The Loudness War: Background,
Speculation and Recommendations [PDF Link, sfxmachine.com]

The paper comes from last November, but it’s as relevant as ever. It’s not just the usual take, either. Its history begins with Phil Spector and vinyl, considering the impact of broadcast TV and not just the music industry. It notes the evolution of compression technologies, particularly multiband technologies.

Most importantly, though – and I’ve spoken regularly to mastering engineers about this – the paper turns to the issue of listening fatigue. Here’s one whithering criticism of the industry on that: some engineers even believe that thoughtless over-compression could be to blame for the decline of the entire industry.

Mastering engineer Bob Ludwig stated, “People talk about downloads hurting record sales. I and some other people would submit that another thing that is hurting record sales these days is the fact that they are so compressed that the ear just gets tired of it. When you’re through listening to a whole album of this highly compressed music, your ear is fatigued. You may have enjoyed the music but you don’t really feel like going back and listening to it again.”

You’ve seen much of this before, but rarely in such well-annotated, comprehensive form.

Best of all? The conclusion applies lessons from Game Theory to work on making the loudness wars come to a conclusion.

Here’s another thought, too: with artists increasingly self-releasing or releasing through more specialized labels, greater access to music online, direct-to-consumer distribution, and online replacements for conventional terrestrial radio, many of the factors that produced some of the oddest hyper-compression at the top of the charts are fading into the background.

Pax Musica for the loudness wars, anyone?

At first, it seemed like it might be just a blip: amidst generally declining sales of physical music, down sharply from their 1990s boom, vinyl sales were trending up. The reversal started with a slight uptick in 2007 – already noticeable as the CD had begun its collapse. That slight uptick has turned into a small boom. From a tiny 300,000 units in US sales in 1993, the vinyl record is projected to do some 3.6 million units in sales. Source:

Vinyl Projected to Grow More Than 25 Percent In 2011…

Let’s put some of this in perspective. Even with explosive growth, vinyl remains at the margins, representing 1.6% of physical sales in the US. In fact, part of the fetish around vinyl is evidenced by the fact that people would make this headline news – fans of the vinyl record are understandably eager to hear their format of choice is doing well. As a point of comparison, in the last 30 days, just one independent band website, Bandcamp, has done US$640,513 in profit for its members. That’s profit, not revenue, and it’s often going directly to artists.

You can also, via Digital Music News, compare to vinyl’s years as the dominant format, which makes this all look very niche:
The Vinyl Comeback, In Historical Perspective…. (Thanks, JP in comments.) That graph doesn’t show per-unit cost, and anecdotally, artists seem closer to the record release process than they once were.

That said, vinyl’s significance in the new world order is arguably more about its cultural meaning than its numbers. (Getting away from numbers – cough, digital – is the point.) Cutting a vinyl record today is about making a physical artefact of a release. It carries with it prestige. Its scarcity is part of its value, with exclusive 12″ releases again returning to the days when DJs were judged by the obscure gems in their collection, not the disposable digital hits.

And I can see any number of benefits to vinyl’s reemergence:

• Bringing tactile back. Records as objects are a pleasure; I’m the last person to argue there. There’s a ritual to putting on a record that changes how you feel about the music, versus the seemingly-infinite, ephemeral digital jukebox.
• Keeping vinyl DJing alive. At this point, it seems more about preserving the record and mixing rather than scratching, but vinyl remains essential for people DJing with turntables. Notably, unlike faking it with digital control vinyl, using actual records is also more reliable – a slight flaw or vibration won’t bring the whole mix to a standstill. (Analog most definitely fails more gracefully than digital.) That makes the presence of vinyl releases doubly important to getting to hear traditional DJ technique.
• Keeping the cutters, and players, in business. The demand for vinyl records, whatever may motivate it, means everything from turntable repair to disk lathe shops remain healthy.
• The sound is unique. I’m leaving perhaps the most significant point for last. The sound of vinyl does remain unique, precisely because of some of its limitations, and I don’t think any amount of fetishization would please some of its consumers if it didn’t sound good.

When I spoke to Anika earlier this year, she brought up the economic point, too – that vinyl keeps things physical, and supports artists. Now, financially, it may be a tenuous point – look at those Bandcamp numbers – but “support” for artists is more than financials alone. And viewed in a larger effort to express the value of music in tangible form, vinyl makes sense.

Vinyl, incidentally, doesn’t have a monopoly on tangible music. Even digital has made various plays on the concept – one of the most unique being Ghostly International’s effort last year to produce “totems” for Matthew Dear, physical objects that represented the spirit of the intangible music.

Sound, above all, is cited as the primary rationalization for vinyl’s resurgence, but that’s where I feel a bit more conflicted:

• Mastering digital for vinyl isn’t the same as a “direct-to-analog” process. Here’s where things get weird. Remember in the early days of CDs, seeing the letters “DDD” and hearing about fully digital signal flow? Now, we have an oddly inverted situation. People are making music almost entirely inside computers, with software like Ableton Live, doing a digital master, and then printing the whole thing to … vinyl. There’s nothing to say that can’t work, but it seems to me a potential mismatch of source material and recording medium. (More on that in a moment.)
• Psuedo-science, go! Let’s face it: there’s plenty of voodoo around “digital,” and plenty of voodoo around “analog.” In the digital domain, the faux science tends to manifest itself as unsupported claims about the value of absurdly-high bit rates and sample rates, or, if you’re really unlucky, gold-plated digital interconnects. In analog, you’ll routinely hear people claim that analog captures “more” sound, because digital leaves “gaps” between samples, missing that both are constrained first and foremost by the transducers. Analog or digital, these are based on misunderstandings about fundamental characteristics of how sound is reproduced and heard from recording media. I think it’d be unfortunate if the genuine value of vinyl and the unique characteristics of its sound were obscured by claims about recording that simply aren’t true.

Vinyl itself is surely not to blame here; it should just raise some questions. Presumably, not all digitally-produced music really fits vinyl as a medium. And the right way to make that fit work is to really listen and apply some scientific understanding of the process.

Vinyl is that it is a unique medium, one with imperfect recording characteristics. That means whatever the source, you do need to mix differently, which makes a recent piece in Electronic Musician very admirable, indeed. (Disclosure: I have never mixed and mastered for vinyl, so I can only look upon this as an enthusiastic listener and interested observer. I welcome feedback from those out there who are more qualified to investigate the questions I’m asking.)

Learn Mixing | Tips for Mixing for Vinyl [Electronic Musician]

Gino Robair, one of my favorite EM writers over the years, goes through some detail about preparing mixes for vinyl as the delivery medium. Part of what you’ll find is a reminder of why engineers were excited about digital in the first place: there’s a greater ability in digital recordings to capture certain details of the high and low end that would distort in an analog recording. So long as you go into the reality of these limitations with your eyes (or make that ears) open, it can be a good experience as a producer, and for your listeners.

This raises still more scientific and perceptual questions, though. I’m not entirely convinced – I haven’t seen evidence in either direction – that it’s in any way necessary to use a 24-bit, 96kHz master for a vinyl release. (Gino points to the example of Arcade Fire using that as the master.) It certainly can’t hurt, especially in the era of cheap storage. But as in direct-digital delivery, the question is whether you really gain from the higher-resolution file. The only way to know for sure would be to do lab-style experimentation and find out, and as readers have lamented on this site before, there’s not a whole lot of that going on.

Vinyl’s good; vinyl’s unique. (So, too, are cassette tapes and other media with which music producers have been re-discovering of late.) It just means that any claims about vinyl’s resurgence should be scaled against the growth of other distribution outlets, and that we should ask honest questions about sound, not just accept either digital or analog claims of “quality” without evaluation.

So, I purposely raise the points above more as a question than a statement. I’m curious to hear from people who are producing and consuming vinyl records, in terms of what they’ve found satisfying and what they’ve found disappointing. (I mean that, in particular, in regards to certain releases – I’m sure some are better than others.)

And I also wonder whether it’s possible to begin to appreciate digital recording with foresight as much as it is vinyl with hindsight. How can we make the most of the format we have today? How can we understand it, in virtual form, as physical object?

At the end of the day, “analog” is not real. (Hence the name.) A recording is an artificial and imperfect snapshot of an event that occurred in the past, frozen in time in an impossible way. It’s what is beautiful about recording, and what terrified, or at least confused, some of those who first heard it. It is a technology conceived as a precursor to email, as a kind of business memo. It has become to many what music is, rather than the reflection of musical performance. It has had a devastating impact on many forms of live performance, emptying bandstands and causing live players their livelihood before anyone became concerned about whether the record industry that was left would lose its financial well-being.

The “record,” whether it’s a cassette tape or a FLAC download, is strange and unnatural, with the ability to bring to life dead musicians and performances that never existed in one place.

And yes, we do really love it.

Mastering to me is a bit like applying stain to wood: done correctly, it brings out the definition of what’s there rather than covering it up. But making mastering effective is a really special art. Danny Wyatt, a veteran mastering engineer now working as an instructor with Dubspot, has some serious credentials both on the mixing and mastering side and as an educator. He’s worked with a range of artists over the years (Wax Poetic featuring Norah Jones, Curtis Mayfield, Thievery Corp., the Roots, Ultra Records, and Mos Def, to name a few). But he also doesn’t mystify his knowledge: he’ll tell you straight what he believes, both face-to-face and as a teacher.

I feel I know Danny’s work a whole lot better, too, having had him master my new solo electronic album, which will be released soon. You can get sort of a loose sense of how someone works when they’re manipulating someone else’s material, but you really get close to their technique when they’ve got their hands on your own stuff.

I like handing over work to a mastering engineer both because they can then provide some objective distance, and because they specialize in the craft. But knowing basic mastering technique is increasingly essential for anyone working in sound – aspiring engineer or not.

Danny has some free videos out, included here, that explain some very useful techniques and tools:

• How to use a limiter, here illustrated with iZotope’s Ozone 4, including its “Loudness Maximizer.” We’re talking distortion-free loudness, not nasty, justly-notorious brick-wall limiting.
• Mid-Side EQ, which I’ve heard Danny call “ear candy,” for widening the stereo effect of a track (here with another of my tracks as the example). Again, he uses Ozone, though other tools could work, too.
• Compression of a bass with URS Classic Console Strip Pro – dubstep-style here, but applicable to a wide range of things. especially with the emulation of the LA-2A modeled compressor.

If those videos whet your appetite, Danny’s class is now taking enrollment for an in-depth online course, so you can benefit from this level of instruction without having to be in New York:
http://www.dubspot.com/mixing-mastering/

And stay tuned, as I did an interview with Danny that digs into his workflow and approach, which we’ll have here on CDM soon.

Have a look at the videos right here:

Harrison is a company with a rich legacy in high-end consoles. Mixbus, their software product, is something of an anomaly. Its analog tape saturation, EQ, filter, compression, and mixing should be sold a la carte for a few hundred bucks each, given the usual business model in this industry. The product should run on some proprietary DAW, and should definitely come with a hardware dongle. And it absolutely, positively shouldn’t run on Linux, because everyone knows you can’t sell a product for Linux.

Instead, Mixbus sells for an intro price for US$79.99. You get the whole package: an entire DAW, plus a software version of Harrison’s 32-series and MR-series consoles, with powerful DSP and mixing features baked in. There’s no dongle. The DAW is the open source Ardour. On the Mac, you get support for Audio Unit plug-ins and any Core Audio interface, plus the superb Mac port of JACK.

And now, in addition to Mac support, you can run the package on Linux, benefiting from native Linux technologies like JACK and LADSPA and (now) LV2 plug-ins. Harrison recommends an audio-based distribution, but two of them – Ubuntu Studio and (Fedora-based) CCRMA – make their packages available in standard Ubuntu and custom Fedora repositories, respectively, which means just about any recent, major distribution will work.

Working with an open source DAW, Ardour, has some practical benefits for users. Aside from benefiting from a mature, open source codebase, the fact that Ardour is free software means you can exchange multitrack projects with friends, even if they don’t own Mixbus or do their work in a different DAW. Ardour takes some time to learn – the interface is spartan, to be sure – but because it’s a free project, it refreshingly focuses on the basics rather than the feature creep that has tended to make the major commercial, proprietary DAWs a bit complex.

Mixbus is simply a joy to use, because it consolidates the user interface into an efficient, productive console, and has some terrific effects to boost. Features:

• “Knob per function” mixing.
• EQ, filter, compression, analog tape saturation, and Harrison’s summing model
• 4 mix bus sends on every channel, and channel strips that each feature filter, EQ, and compression.
• Tone controls, compression, sidechaining, and tape saturation on the mix buses (hence the name), and on the stereo master bus, too – meaning this works nicely for mastering.
• Plugin delay compensation for features like parallel compression.
• Metering with peak, peak hold, compressor gain reduction on each track and bus – again, bringing mastering and mixing into a nice interface.

All of this operates in an extremely lightweight system that runs comfortably on a fairly low-end laptop, without having to sacrifice audio fidelity. (As with any multitrack system, just make sure you have a capable hard disk; that’s what I find to be the most significant bottleneck.)

In short, it’s a brilliant tool for plug-in hosting, thanks to all the routing options, and for finally finishing tracks, thanks to mix- and master-friendly features. On the Mac, support for AU means your plug-ins come with you from another DAW when you want to finish your music. On Linux (and on the Mac), you can use JACK to route in everything from a Pure Data patch to a recording for conventional mixing.

On the Mac, it’s a no-brainer purchase that makes a fantastic tool in your arsenal for finishing music. On Linux, it could be the release that finally makes a Linux-based studio practical.

Version 1.5 also introduces some new features alongside the Linux release, including a key-mappable “play with pre-roll” Transport command and playhead edit range Transport snapping (huge time-savers), thinning for dynamic automation, and a Gain tool you can use to adjust curves in a region.

I spoke to Harrison about some of the details of what’s on offer here.

CDM: Can you describe what’s built into Mixbus’ console from a processing standpoint? What makes this console special? A lot is made of “summing,” but that’s – unless I’m missing something you’re doing – typically the least interesting part of DSP design in a mixer. So tell us what does make working with Mixbus different sonically?

There’s the obvious stuff…. the built-in EQs, compressors, tape saturation, and final limiter…. done by our in-house DSP guys. But I assume that’s not what you mean.

One fundamental difference in Mixbus is the fact that everything is always “in” … for example, when you turn on an EQ, that processing is already allocated so you won’t push your CPU over the edge while undertaking the art of “mixing”. This sounds trivial, but it has significant implications in the workflow, sound, and “immediacy” of the mixer. A second big difference is the fixed number of pre-allocated buses (both graphically and DSP-wise) which is quite different from the normal DAW mixer. This will become more apparent as we develop Mixbus further, in a way that is parallel with – but different than – Ardour and more traditional DAWs.

Summing is a hot-button topic, for sure. On some level, there will be a simple addition, just like there is an addition of voltages/current on the summing bus of an analog console. But nobody would say that 2 analog consoles sound the same. Similarly, there are design decisions to be made on digital mixers. For example, our EQs are implemented in 64-bit, and there is a dither stage in each channel. When multiple channels are summed together, you can handle this dither in different ways. The difference isn’t in the actual summing, but qualitative differences come from these signals when they are summed.

Ed.: That makes some sense – the summing stage itself, which is what people will often describe when comparing DAWs, shouldn’t theoretically be any different, but the way you handle changes in bit depth in various mixing stages prior to summing could make a big difference. I pushed Harrison on this partly because I’ve been having some heated discussions with developers and engineers about this topic, so we can go further into it if interested – but it’s good to know how Mixbus works, and I can confirm that mixing in the software is really a joy. -PK

Finally, there’s the rule that in digital it’s hard to “improve” the quality of sound, but there are a hell of a lot of ways to screw it up. Avoiding these landmines, or designing to accomodate them on a given platform, is something that comes from a lot of experience.

What’s the relationship of Mixbus to other Harrison products? How did they inform this design?

We designed the Mixbus mixer using the same people & process that we would apply to a hardware mixer. Every design has “tradeoffs” associated with it: features, bit depth, gain stages, dithering, oversampling, parameter ramping methods, etc etc. There’s also a lot of thought that gets put into the parameter ranges …. where should the EQ center frequencies be? How wide a range should they cover? These are things that we (a) think about much more frequently than the typical DAW developer and (b) have a very wide experience to draw from.

Aside from the fact that it’s already there, can you talk about some specific advantages of working with Ardour? Any tips you’ve personally found while working with it, from a workflow / usability standpoint?

Coming from the rarified world of high-end audio systems, we recognized a lot of the same qualities in Ardour. Some examples: “The things you do 1000 times a day are very easy to apply, while the things you do once per day don’t matter where they appear” …. “Anything that you do automatically, while really helpful in some cases, will be terribly wrong in other cases” ….. “first-time-user intuitiveness isn’t as important as long-term usability to a pro” ….. “customization on a truly deep level is important for enterprise-class facilities” …. stuff like that.

These are subtleties. How do you make a soundbyte out of the overall “gestalt” that Ardour/Mixbus has? It is the result of many iterations driven by real-world users. Sometimes it’s about going back-and-forth until finally settling on the “least evil” of evil compromises. It doesn’t make good ad copy

One huge point: Ardour (in many cases) is a superset of the features of workstations. For example, the AudioFile (a high end hardware DAW by AMS/Neve) had the feature of “transparent regions”… so you could stack multiple sounds on a single track. Ardour has a “transparent” flag for regions, so you can do this. An interesting point here is that the Ardour session file format could conceivably become the shared standard of nearly other DAW. Presumably we’ll be able to support nearly any workflow that a user wants, once we get the UI’s developed.

Mixbus users – or potential Mixbus users – we’d love to hear from you. If you’re using the tool now, let us know how it’s working for you. And if you’re considering using it, let us know what’d be helpful to you. I suspect a tutorial on setting everything up on Linux would be a good place to start; it’s powerful, but not immediately intuitive out of the box.

http://www.harrisonconsoles.com/

I’ve been waiting for the near-ubiquitous ExpressCard slot on laptops to see some audio goodness, so one of the more welcome announcements of NAMM is that there’s now finally an ExpressCard-enabled version of the Universal Audio platform. The UAD is a DSP platform for computers, with an emphasis on high-quality, boutique mastering and effects plug-ins, including some recent, familiar emulations of classic Roland and Moog gear. UA’s stuff really does sound great, and host support has been improving (look for the key words “latency compensation” in your host of choice). So it’s about time that laptop users get in on some of the fun the desktop users have had.

The surprise is, the UAD-2 SOLO doesn’t cost that much – $500 includes the card plus the “1176SE Compressor/Limiter, Pultec EQP-1A Equalizer, RealVerb Pro Room Modeler, and CS-1 Channel Strip.” That’s a premium over native plug-ins, but then you have access to other UA plugs later on. In other news, Antares and Manley Labs signed onto UA’s platform, so more stuff is coming.

And by the way, while the forums rip into the choice of DAW, this stuff will work everywhere – even, via RTAS, Pro Tools.

Universal’s stuff isn’t for everyone, but I’m pleased that laptop users are getting something more out of a slot on their machine. (You’ll find ExpressCard on most PCs and the MacBook Pro, as well.) I hope this is the first of more hardware to come.

http://www.uaudio.com/

Mastering – spoiled for choice? This means in mastering choices, you’ve got the UAD, IK’s T-RackS 3 announced at the end of last year, and iZotope’s Ozone 4 announced at NAMM. I’ll be talking to some folks in New York who know something about mastering (i.e., are not me). (One of them is a big Cubase fan, so I expect he’ll also be all over Cubase 5 – and he makes records that make real money, whereas I make records that go nicely with experimental modern dance.)

Each of these products goes a different direction, but the honest truth is almost any DAW will start you out with a pretty great selection of effects tools, and for a small chunk of change, you can add on with something like the UAD, T-RackS, and iZotope. None of this changes your actual skill level or the quality of your ears, but it does help keep your wallet from being the major barrier.