Album: Castlevania: Sonata of the Damned

Or use ReplayGain in any proper MP3 player... this album is AWESOME. Josh is AWESOME !!

You own the volume knob, so use it, sir!

When opened up in Audacity, one can see just how many times Fear of Haze goes through the red to the point it's surprising it doesn't distort as far as I'm able to hear.

So basically it sounds like it doesn't distort, but you'd rather moan about what the waveform looks like (which is fine btw, no clipping whatsoever).

It's audio, listen to it.

It's one thing to say that you don't like the way the songs are mastered, but it's another to make factually incorrect claims. This really isn't fair to Josh, especially when you don't know what you're talking about.

1. Fear of Haze is not clipping. None of the drum hits are. They're getting limited/compressed a bit, as you would expect in any piece of music with drums.

2. It's not that loud. Average of -7.88dB in the left channel and -8.09dB in the right. Compare to the following mixes:

* The most recently posted FFXIII mix: -6.58/-6.74.

* tefnek's "Drop and Roll" from Streets of Rage: -7.29/-7.27

* Tetris Thirty-Plus Mix: -7.91/-7.84

* Sixto's recent Mega Man 2 mix: -7.61/-7.56

* Goat's "Froggy Mosh": -6.83/-7.34

And so on. I could find plenty more examples. This album is, objectively speaking, no louder than countless other mixes and projects on the site. If we were to compare to popular electronica, you'd be even more shocked as tracks like Pendulum's "Self vs. Self" has an average loudness of -4.78/-4.90 (and, IMO, it still sounds absolutely amazing. Nobody complains about the loudness.) That's literally twice the loudness of Fear of Haze (+3dB = loudness increased by a factor of two.)

If I could recommend a maximum volume peak, I'd try 94 dB at its very loudest; trust me on this.

3. This doesn't even make sense on so many levels. Digital audio - and sound in general - is not measured like that. You can't say one song is '80 dB' and another is '90 dB'. Digital audio files have a variable amount of dynamic range depending on their bitrate. For example, 16-bit audio (which is everything on the site) has a dynamic range of 96dB. This means that the difference between the quietest sound and the loudest sound can't be any greater than 96dB.

Audio files thus are measured starting at -96dB (or lower, depending on bit depth) and have a digital limit of 0dB. Anything above 0dB is clipped audio. Practically speaking, this has little to do with peaks. The "peak" just refers to the single loudest point of audio. A song could be at -50dB the entire time, and then a single snare could peak at 0dB. In fact, it is standard practice in any genre of music to normalize the audio, bringing the loudest peak to 0dB anyway. So, it makes no sense to tell anyone what the "maximum volume peak" should be. It should always be 0 dB.

But not only does that not make sense, but using numbers like 70, 80 and 90 dB don't make sense either, due to the way sound is measured (as I described). You're most likely referring to the dBSPL scale, which is based on the threshold of human hearing (0 dBSPL = silence, 130 dBSPL = threshold of pain, etc.) However, you can't compare pieces of music on this scale. For example, if I put on "Fear of Haze" and turn my speakers all the way down, it's 0 dbSPL. If I turn them up to a low volume, that might be 40 dBSPL. In other words, dBSPL can't be used within a piece of music to measure loudness. It's more of a measure of the volume output of speakers or headphones.

So, what you really REALLY mean to say is that the average volume level (RMS - root mean square) of the track is too high. But, as I said earlier, that isn't really true either because there are plenty of tracks with as high or higher average levels.

With all these nice arrangements, I can't help but wonder why nobody bothered to complain about the sound so far.

Seriously.

It's obnoxiously loud in the same way as those insanely loud, overcompressed commercials inbetween an average-volume programme on TV.

When opened up in Audacity, one can see just how many times Fear of Haze goes through the red to the point it's surprising it doesn't distort as far as I'm able to hear.

The more frequent the 'clipping', or the highest peaks getting cut off by the digital limit on a loud audio file, the higher the chance of distortion will become, and the higher the chance of losing finer detail in the loudest parts, essentially reducing these to digital bricks.

I like the album, but this is one seriously annoying blight upon it.

Just avoid this kind of loudness in the future, period.

That's what the volume knob is for.

If I could recommend a maximum volume peak, I'd try 94 dB at its very loudest; trust me on this.

Anyway, 4 stars given for the album, 1 taken for the distractingly loud sound.

I hope you'll at least check out this feedback; I'm not trying to bring you down in any way, but it needs to be said.

Pretty amazing. The sound chosen for this made some of the songs sound lulzy as fuck.

Sparkle is amazing on this. Order of Ecclesia is easily one of my favorite Castlevanias, and it was great to hear it get some love. I feel the quality varies between some songs, but they still all are very good stuff.

I thought it was a collaboration between at least 3 people. I guess I didn't read the page too well.

If that is the case, then this album got even more badass.

Kadosho, you do realize this was just one person who did this remix album. Right?

Congrats to this diverse and fun collab everyone.

Hope for many more projects from this group sometime soon.

This album is nothing short of inspirational. I'll admit when I first downloaded it, I was expecting rock or metal -- the typical response to Castlevania. But I was pleasantly surprised and introduced to Joshua Morse's music through this album. The man never ceases to amaze me. I can't wait to hear what he has in store for the future. I also support the idea of single-artist albums, as mentioned by Radiowar.

I have only been able to download the three songs posted on the site (my college does not let me use torrents or they'll shut off my internet...)... So I'll have to wait until I get home to get the full listing.

However, from what I HAVE listened to, and what i have listened to on this site, I'll say this right now:

These are probably the best CV remixes I have heard to come from OCremix, counting everything else that has been made here.

Full of energy, and i love the jazzy-rock textures, along with the great use of percussive/jazz organs (gotta love them), these are really sights to behold (or is that sounds to be-hear???). Admirable job on them, and this definitely makes my "listen to often" selection from OCremix.

This is great! Favourites : demonic conception, madd forest, sparkle. Sparkle also has such a different feel than its original.. I love it.

...I like the more expansive projects with multiple remixers myself, but Sonata of the Damned is not bad.

single-artist OCR albums? i support this. really dig it so far, good stuff josh.