02019-07-01 | Music, Technology
And just like that the loudness wars are over. Honestly, I only found out about it this weekend. I was having lunch with Jon Gagan and he informed me about this, apparently not so new, development. Yesterday I did some research and reached the conclusion that I will have to mix several different versions of the new album, one for streaming, one for CD, and perhaps a third one for HD files.
How did the loudness wars end? It was the logical result of so many millions of people subscribing to streaming services, like Apple Music or Spotify. Whether one listens to a personal playlist or a curated stream of music, it’s not fun to have the volume go up and down with each track. In fact sudden changes in loudness are the #1 source of user complaints. The same is true for watching a bunch of videos on YouTube. It would be annoying if some of the videos were much louder than others, right?
As a result the streaming services came up with guidelines and are turning down loud songs. Here is an article about loudness normalization across different platforms. This has been going on for a while now. Here is an article about YouTube normalizing volume since December 2015.
If you want to see what this means in practical terms, go to the website Loudness Penalty and drag and drop any mp3 file on it. It will show by how much that file will be turned down by streaming services.
Here are a few links to posts I made about this subject in the past:
https://ottmarliebert.com//?p=3080
https://ottmarliebert.com//?p=2141
https://ottmarliebert.com//?p=5792
https://ottmarliebert.com//?p=3938
02009-03-05 | Uncategorized
Tonight the sky is cloudy, large shapeless clouds that cover Santa Fe as if somebody placed a giant milky bowl over the city. As the sun is setting, that translucent, but not clear bowl lights up in many shades of yellow and orange. It has an otherworldly, slightly threatening look.
This morning I rode the Mariachi Bullitt to Counter Culture to have breakfast with Jon. We always order the exact same food and I remarked that it would be a funny scene for a movie. A man or woman who always eats the same dish for breakfast at restaurant A, followed by a certain dish for lunch at restaurant B and another specific dish for dinner at restaurant C. Do you do that, asked the counter person, horrified. I said, of course not, but it would be funny.
Later I walked to Mello Velo, but my fixie wasn’t ready yet and so I walked back, making a pit stop at Downtown Subscription.
The afternoon was spent in the studio, working on Bikers #3 – I am using the working titles our engineer wrote onto the 2 inch analog multitrack tapes in 1995 – from the LAVA recording and Heart Still/Beating from The Santa Fe Sessions. Both pieces are coming along very nicely and should make their Ottmar-Friends debut sometime in the coming months. A CD of the remixed and remastered album The Santa Fe Sessions will be released in 2010 – twenty years after Nouveau Flamenco. Or maybe it will be released as a download-only album.
LR sent me a link to an article in the UK Times called Young Music Fans Deaf to iPod’s Limitations. It seemed to me that the writer mixed up Data Compression and Dynamic Range Compression, which are two very different things. I wrote about the article and you can feel free to leave comments or questions at the end of this here post.
For dinner I made an arrugula pesto (I substitute arrugula for basil and use walnuts instead of pine nuts) for dinner and experimented with using less water to boil pasta – see this article in the NY Times. Used a large frying pan and 1.5 quarts of water. Worked well.
02009-03-05 | Music
Young music fans deaf to iPod’s limitations – Times Online
Research has shown, however, that today’s iPod generation prefers the tinnier and flatter sound of digital music, just as previous generations preferred the grainier sounds of vinyl. Computers have made music so easy to obtain that the young no longer appreciate high fidelity, it seems.
The theory has been developed by Jonathan Berger, Professor of Music at Stanford University, California. For the past eight years his students have taken part in an experiment in which they listen to songs in a variety of different forms, including MP3s, a standard format for digital music. “I found not only that MP3s were not thought of as low quality, but over time there was a rise in preference for MP3s,” Professor Berger said.
LR comments:
mp3 doesn’t have the dynamic range of a .wav file, although surely it captures more than vinyl or a cassette! Ears are like eyes — not everyone can hear in high resolution.
The dynamic range of an mp3 does not differ so much from an uncompressed .wav or .aif file. The difference lies in how music has been mastered in he last decade. Too much limiting, too much compression during the mastering process. At this point many people are used to that clipping sound and many young people have grown up with it. It’s how all pop music sounds at this point
On the other hand, listen to an mp3 file from my One Guitar album, the source of which was NOT compressed at all and you will notice that the mp3 does a very good job of delivering the dynamics of the recording.
I would conclude that the professor looked at the wrong data. The culprit is not the mp3 file, which as LR points out can be no worse than a cassette was, but the way recordings are mastered today. The last Metallica album will sound flat as a pancake (no dynamics whatsoever) whether you listen to the CD or an mp3. (((I haven’t heard that album, but many people have written about it and Stevo has told me)))
Please note that the term “compression” is used for two very different events.
1. Compression AKA Audio Level Compression AKA Dynamic Range Compression is the act of literally squeezing the music file to make the soft parts as loud as possible. This results in music that can be heard over the engine of your car or in noisy restaurants, but it also means that the dynamic range is lost. Hm, imagine Dürer using a sharpie instead of pencil. On or off, no gradation, so subtlety etc.
2. Compression AKA Data-Compression, is designed to reduce the size of audio files. There is Lossless Compression, e.g. FLAC or Apple Lossless, and there is Lossy Compression, e.g. mp3, OGG and nearly every movie on DVD!
Related Links:
Everythink Louder Than Everything Else
Dynamic Range
02009-03-02 | Music
the music of sound
» Interview with a Master..
Rashad Becker, of the legendary Berlin mastering company Dubplates & Mastering:
If you talk about real mistakes, I’d say most mistakes are really related to limiting. Second most mistakes are related to compression, and thats about it. Mistakes – there are a lot of things I have to cope with, which derive from being uneducated or inexperienced, like for example people keep sculpting their sound by boosting frequencies if they feel an element is not prominent enough in the mix. Lets boost it! If it has not enough bass or not enough high end – lets boost!!!
Instead I try to educate my customers to think the other way round: Scrutinize every singal for consistency, check for what disturbs it, and try to remove that, and not primarily check the signal for what’s too little…
Everything loudest all the time! (((I am, of course, kidding)))
I am still waiting for the soft-revolution, a generation of teenagers so sick of the noise and the volume, that they only listen to the softest sounds and music. Un-Metal, Feather-Metal, Nobody-Home-House, Empty-Garage, Soundproof-Garage, No-Drum’N’Bass, Soft-Punk – those are just a few of the new music labels…
02009-02-19 | Photos
Breakfast with Jon. We talked about life-compression, the limiting of extremes, the cutting off of amplitude. We notice it in music. Lack of dynamics due to too much compression of music (see Email from an Audient, The Future of Music, Everything Louder Than Everything Else and Dynamic Range), but also the selection of music we listen to. Radio being what it is, most people will listen to their mp3 players or CD collection in their cars and at home. Gone are those days when I would call the local radio station and inquire about a song that was unfamiliar and surprising and beautiful and moving.
But it does not stop there. Physical comfort robs us of experience, cuts off the amplitude. With modern convenience heating and cooling systems some people never let the temperatur in their home get lower than 68ºF or higher than 72ºF. Then they walk into their garage and step into their cars which contain equally powerful heating and cooling devices. Nowadays we can even travel like this. From the airconditioned plane into the airconditioned airport, into the airconditioned bus, into the airconditioned hotel… was India hot? Not that I noticed.
One of my fondest memories is how my brother and I woke up in the sixties. Mom would come into our freezing room, turn on the heater and lay our clothes on top of it. We had ten minutes to wake up and when we pulled our clothes on they were nice and warm. Warm bed to cold room to warm clothes – a whole cornucopia of feelings within minutes of waking up.
Or when I woke up early in the morning in Tibet, in the Autumn of 2006, and went from feeling warm-ish in the sleeping bag to freezing while I pulled my clothes on. Then I would step outside of my tent into even greater cold and then I would receive a piping hot steel cup of tea. There is nothing better than holding a hot, hot steel cup in your hands when it is freezing outside.
Groceries – check
Gasoline – zero
Excercise – check
Health Club Fees – zero
That sunset happened on the fifth, the Mariachi Bullitt was photographed when I returned from having breakfast with Jon and grocery shopping.
