...do my mastering with Ardour?

Getting Stuff Done How do I .... ?
#1

Hey, how do you do it?

I used to work with specific Mastering plugins in Sonar (Oxygen). The use of this plugin and its presets made life sooooo easy. A few tweaks to adapt it to my taste and that was it…

Is there anything open source that works with Ardour? If not, I suppose I will have to add tons of LADSPA FX on the Master pre bus…

#2

Thx for the link, I´ll go through that! It´s true , mixing is the thing that counts,… and there are quite view people in the world saying you need expensive analog or digital hardware for mastering, cause the analog master compressors sound somewhjat better and so on… but i don´t really believe this so much , so I´ll try to master my next stuff on my own and will see if its ok, and wont give it to a mastering studio… thx again :slight_smile:

#3

Calimerox, there’s also one thing you need to be aware of :

your mixing system may use good speakers for mixing (neutral, etc) but for mastering, you will need to test the result on different situations so if you have otehr sound systems around (living-room, car, even crappy laptops!), don’t hesitate. A good mastering work should in principle be “passe-partout” :slight_smile:

Oh yeah, it also has to do with having a consistent level on all your songs. An album (if that’s what you plan to produce) should really be consistent across the entire thing.

#4

Jamin comes to mind. It’s a standlone app but is typically used as an insert in ardour’s master bus. Works nicely together.

So you launch jamin by typing from the terminal

jamin -p

this will NOT connect jamin’s jack ports to your system outputs. This is necessary as you will use it inside ardour (or via an insert to be precise).

In the master bus, create an insert (pre-fader or post, pre may be more convenient). Double click on it, connect its outputs to jamin’s inputs and vice-versa (you cannot go wrong, it’s easy). Activate the insert, tweak jamin, and voila :slight_smile:

You can export ardour’s session with jamin’s effects in realtime. No wait, even better, in freewheeling :slight_smile:

#5

Hi GodlikeCreature!!! For Mastering i recommend you to use Jamin (http://jamin.sourceforge.net/en/about.html) an excellent software :slight_smile:

Good Bye!!!

#6

:slight_smile: Sorry Thorgal, Because we put the same almost at the same time. When i was writting the comment there was no reply. Again Sorry.

Bye!!!

#7

no big deal, twice is better than none :slight_smile:

#8

Let’s make it three times

#9

jamin is THE mastering suite for linux. I like it better than Oxygen except for oxygen having 4 sections in the multiband comp and jamin only has 3. I like jamin’s interface much better though

#10

thorgal what do you mean by this statement.

"No wait, even better, in freewheeling "

Can you or someone explain this please.

Thanks

Philip

#11

Hi Philip, sure. It means that exporting a session or bouncing a region takes a shorter time than its real time playback. I heard that some DAWs can only export in real time, which means that a 4mn song would take 4mn to export (or longer but then, it’s slower than realtime). Jack allows to export or bounce quite fast! thank god for that! :slight_smile:

#12

Hi everyone!

Thanks for all the responses, it seems JAMin is a strong winner. Have downloaded it now and will give it a try tonight… It definitely looks great!!..

#13

Hey!

I tried jamin and I have to say it looks very powerful. I could experience how painfully resource eating it can be, so I ended up exporting my session into a file, then importing that mix into a single stereo track and doing my mastering that way. End result is the same and it is more forgiving on the system (I am working on a standard, not specially powerful laptop).

Thanks all for your help once again!

#14

can someone give me an advice where I can find info about Mastering in general? I tried myself with jamin and it sounded awful, and that was not jamins fault but was my lesson in mastering, realising that good mastering is an art…

#15

Hey, calimerox,

You are right, Mastering is definitely not an easy task. The jamin site has an interesting tutorial with examples, pretty interesting.

Simply put, mastering is just about volume management. That means that if you are trying to get a poor sounding mix into a great sounding final product through mastering, you probably would be better off investing more time into properly mixing. In fact, I think the goal should be to have a very good mix, which can almost stand alone. Then you apply mastering to provide a bit more power and volume, but that should be it.

I know I am not giving you anything you didn´t know, but I really think mixing is the biggest part of the equation.

Having said so, these tips are pretty good.

http://www.harmony-central.com/articles/tips/10_essential_mastering_tips/

Good luck

#16

rtp , send you a file! it´s just a stereo guitartrack of a solo artist… better would be having a band recording… if someone of you are up to maybe we can make a “mastering - contest” or something like that… :wink: if someone contributes a band-song… guess we would all learn quite a lot…this night I´ll put a link were you can download the song (I´m at work and forgot the link)… lets see if someone is interested…

#17

If I have to nitpick, mastering is something done to a collection of songs, like and album, not to a collection of tracks (that’s mixing) and absolutely not to a single track (that’s, idunno, EQ:ing?)…

#18

Unless it’s released as a single :-p

#19

so lets say its a single :-p

http://rapidshare.de/files/45604863/alexformastering.wav.html

#20

calimerox,

Thanks for sending a link to the file. I sent a link of the mastered version to you. Download and feel free to post my master of your song–I really enjoyed the song, performance and production quality. Please note that my master was performed in six or less seconds. And I’ve done this to prove a point.

Because mastering is an often debated topic I’ve decided to produce a mastering video. My partners and I did the first camera shoot, yesterday. There’s a bunch of video screen capture, graphics and written material to produce but I think we’ll have a finished product within a week or two. Production is mostly an issue of having time to work on the project.

I’ll revisit the Loudness document and perhaps address a couple points that have been brought up in this thread. Despite having a garage full of 1/4, 1/2 and 1" tape our tutorial will only address digital audio. It will not cover topics from the analog tape and vinyl era.