Premastering & clipping posted by...

Premastering & clipping

Posted on Aug 04, 2004 06:10 pm
AndrewB
Member Since: Feb 11, 2003

I've undertaken some premastering (eg OZONE) on some finished songs and a couple of issues came up.

1. Should I mixdown the song to 2 track stereo mix with OZONE in the master bus (I use Cakewalk Pro8 - still works fine!)? or
2. Mixdown to 2 track stereo with nothing in master bus and then treat it with OZONE (or equivalent)?

The problem I have with doing 2. is that the stereo mix will have quite a bit of clipping (for some songs)if there is no compression/limiter in the master bus. The obvious answer is to put some compression (eg Blockfish) in the master bus, mix down to 2 tracks then process with OZONE. However this way I'm compressing the song twice.

Should I just lower the master fader to stop clipping in the first place?

Thanks
Andrew

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Walt
Chief Cook and Bottle Washer
Member
Since: May 10, 2002

Aug 04, 2004 11:16 pm

My approach is to lower my master output and do the mixdown to a stereo file; no clipping on mixdown. I am not familiar with Cakewalk, but per Cubase over modulation on individual tracks during mixdown is no problem, only the master output. Post mixing, import the mixed song and treat it with Ozone. Use the loudness maximizer to get your desired volume. That is the whole purpose of the mazimizer, to create extended volume, real and preceived without clipping.