Loudness wars aside.

This morning I decided I’m no longer going to refer to my final stage before burning to CD or ripping to MP3 as “Mastering.” Cause really, what I’m doing probably in no way resembles mastering. It’s “Finalizing.” Yeah, that makes sense.

Someday, I look forward to actually getting a finished CD mastered by someone who knows what they’re doing, has a good acoustic space, and won’t squash the crap out of it.

Until that time I do it myself. (Right now I’m looking forward to finishing a CD.)

For a long time I’d brought my bounced 2-bus mix into SoundForge and worked from there. I’ve always mixed low so I always have a fair degree of headroom in which to work. Using the plugin chainer I would run the wave through Vintage Warmer+GlissEQ+dbMasteringLimiter - though I’d switched to iZotope Ozone mastering limiter included with version 9.

But with the new version of Sonar, I’ve set up a much more flexible finalizing template. I can having two tracks of different mixes running through 2 busses that I can mix and match, so I can play with different DSP chains. To be honest, I pretty much run it through the same sequence; though I’m using the new Boost10 included in Sonar which is a really great plugin. Plus Sonar has great dithering options. And with my new Sonar-template setup I can run all kinds of eye-candy and tools - VintageMeter, analyzers, and now this.

Ozone has an option for killing intersample overs, but as quickly as I gained that knowledge I it became unavailable to me as it’s tied to SoundForge. So this will slot in nicely to my new finalizing template. So, yea! for SSL for this nice freebie. And some day I’ll have the resource to get one of these.

Cheers to AI for the heads up.

As I’ve written, I am a user who got onboard with digital lo-fi production using some free version of ACID. Since I upgraded to 3.0 Pro at a time when Sonic Foundry was just throwing its products onto the market like it was a fire sale, I got Sound Forge for a cheap price. I also got CDArchitect, the Noise Reduction Bundle and the Batch Converter, all really cheap. So after updating to the first Sony versions, Sound Forge 7, I believe, I swore I was done giving Sony my money. Partially a principled stance for their part in the RIAA, rootkits and DRM disasters, and partially because it seem that what the updates mostly provided were the other parts of the Sonic Foundry IP re-branded and offered as incentive.

I recently relented and upgraded to version 9. Why? Well, apparently I’m not a principled person. Technically, the frustrations of ver. 7 were getting in my way (lack of custom key-bindings, poor plugin performance, various editing limitations), and none of the free alternatives are quite there in terms of interface and flexibility. And there were seemingly some other nice features that it looked like I could use, so I took advantage of the $99 upgrade offer. Already, it’s proved to be worth it.

While performing some edits in Sound Forge 9, I discovered this:

Previously when editing from the Process menu once that model window was open you were limited to its controls, and if you didn’t have the sample you were editing selected just so, you had to cancel out and start again. Or, more likely, undo and then redo. So pulling down the volume of a transient, or dropping a reverb on an ending, usually resulted in clicks at zero crossing of the sample edit region or one sample drop-outs.

No more. Thought the screen-cap below (click the image for full size) doesn’t show the mouse, if you roll-over the edit regions you can completely edit the fades and level right on the sample section. You can even tweak the edit region’s start and end points. Leveling out wild transients and normalizing small regions is a breeze. It works with a lot of the Process menu and Effect menu items as well as any plugin. So you really can do very percise audio editing small sample of audio and really get it right the first time.

It’s possible this showed up in version 8; I’m just discovering it now.

(Oh, and the audio in the screen cap is demonstration only. I wasn’t actually leveling the audio.)