Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Fun with Audacity - Dynamic Compression

Ok, I think I've figured it out. I'm ripping as lossless WAV. Ok, how are you capturing the jpg images above, I don't see where the program will allow for saving the graph?

I do have a nice screen capture tool called printscreen2000 I could use...

sounds forge is another cool piece of software. I played around with it on my step dad's computer... I think its like 300 bucks though

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/products/product.asp?pid=431

Printscreen will do the trick. I use Gadwin Printscreen, myself.

Ok, I just grabbed an old CD from Great White I had laying around. Here is the waveform and spectrum (energy) graphs for that song.

Based on the other graphs, that looks pretty clean.

And here is an example off of my kids Baby needs Mozart CD. Mozart's Divertimento String Quartet D Major by Salzburg Symphony No1.

Please believe me that I don't mean to sound cocky in saying this, but I've been working with audio editing software for years and have seen waveforms like this for just as long with recent recordings.

It pi**es me off, actually, that it's become so commonplace with recent mastering. It's gotten to the point where I'm surprised when a recent (popular) recording DOESN'T look like that. I still DO get surprised, however, to see how many discs go above "0" dB.

It's one of the biggest reasons why I'm re-exploring vinyl. Since those graphs are results of compression and normalizing in the final mastering stages, I'm hoping that some LPs are NOT mastered the same way....i.e., despite surface noise, etc...some LPs might actually offer superior playback because of the final steps of mastering for CD not having been done the same heavy-handed way.

Nice. What does that second set of graphs mean? Red = your ears are gonna blead at 106db on M80s??

I used audiacty to cut a couple of songs for my daughter. I believe it resamples when I writes a new track so you lose some quality, but thats not an issue for what I did.

The tracks? Floyd Pink Floyd - Ummagumma , Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pikt and Bike. She seems to have my taste for the eclectic.

Those tracks looked pretty good on the graphs, no compression, but I am almost afraid to look at some of my other stuff.

Fred

Yeah, looking at various tracks in my own collection confirmed just how prevalent the compression is.

I think the red graph shows the "energy" of the song. I really have no idea what I'm doing or what these graphs show me.

How can I tell from looking at these graphs if there is compression or clipping?