[ardour-users] It is not loud enough

[Kevin Cosgrove]

On 26 October 2005 at 17:19, Paul Winkler <pw_lists at slinkp.com> wrote:

> On 10/26/05, Kevin Cosgrove <kevinc at doink.com> wrote:
> > It sure would be easier to have the scale be logarithmic, at
> > least to me.  The way it is only 1/2 of the scale is really
> > usable.  Maybe having this be configurable, if only in the
> > ardour.rc, might be good.  Thoughts?
>
> That might be a nice option, but I wouldn't want it to be the
> only option as it would break with decades of tradition of
> soundfile editor displays.

Yes, I've been annoyed with those traditions for decades. ;-)
At work I live with a highly configurable graphics and analysis
program (part of a proprietary circuit simulator) which is
better in many ways than Mathcad, though not as sophisticated as
Mathematica.  I guess I'm spoiled.

> Now that you mention it, I've noticed that levels into my
> Delta seem to be fairly low.  I haven't taken the time to
> investigate, but I suspect it may be expecting a +4 line level
> and I may be feeding it -10.

Absolutely do check your input pad switch.  I did, and it made
a great improvement.  Whether I can actually hear it is another
story.  Drums have a pretty big dynamic range, which I'd like to
capture.  Maybe I'll squash the living bits out of that dynamic
range with a compressor, but I'd like to start with as much as
I can get so as not to raise the noise floor too much with a
compressor.

> Doesn't seem to be a big problem for audio quality, though.
> There's plenty of resolution in 24 bits.  I just right-click ->
> normalize each region immediately after recording it.  Works
> for my meager needs, and makes it easier to get the overall mix
> in the right ballpark.

I don't know the internals of the normalizer you're using, which
I hadn't discovered yet.  Does it just multiply the whole region
by whatever gain is necessary to bring the highest peak in the
region up to 0dBFS?

> If I was paying money to use my "studio", though, I'd want the
> owner to know for sure what was going on there ;-)

I like to know what's going on.  At times I have to remind myself
to quit messing with the gear and play some music.  I'm still
getting all set up.  The present setup is pretty good, but it
needs a little more tinkering to get to the point that I can
turn it on, click record, and then just play, play, play.  I'm
learning a lot lurking on this list.  I guess I'm a bit noisy
today.

Cheers....

--
Kevin