Mark7

Dosbox is also a possibility. Problem is that you actually have to play the game to hear the music. It should be possible to record the music to wav and make mp3 of those. Or you can record to a format that Adplug can play. Goodluck

So what does such a test say? Absolutely nothing about sound quality, because the exact same song with the same quality is preferred at louder volume. It just shows how easily ppl are misleaded. Higher volume is just an illusion of better quality, which most people apparently fall for. The illusion is so strong that even when the quality suffers severely (like today's clipped music) people still think it is better. It's sad that most people don't realize that.

What makes you say that? It does sound different and when you look at this screen shot you can easily see that the peaks look (and sound) much better in the guitar hero version.

Why would louder be better? Right, there is no reason. 16bit sound has a huge dynamic range so that cannot be the reason. Mp3 does not even have a bitdepth so theoretically it can have an even bigger dynamic range. I understand when you are using dynamic compression for artistic reasons (you really like the sound better). But using hyper compression, multiband compression, softclipping and whatnot just to get the music louder is a bad reason imho. With loud mastering you only increase the chance that you are getting clipping or destoying details in your music. IMHO the only genre which might get away with loud mastering is (hard) rock. But even with that genre the mastering goes over the top nowadays. Listen to Red Hot Chilli Peppers - Californication, Stadium Arcadium or Metallica - Death Magnetic. Do you like that sound? (I don't). The vinyl version of Stadium Arcadium is known to sound better than the CDs due to quieter mastering. Same goes for Death Magnetic and the Guitar Hero version. All other genres suffer more easily from loud mastering and treated even more carefully.

I would probably prefer the slightly quieter version. Quality always suffers with nowadays loudness/mastering. Are you sure the quality didn't suffer?

After i read your message saying you never had any problems it struck me. The program i use to import these midis could be the problem. So tried some other midi programs and those didn't have any trouble. Turns out Cakewalk 9 doesn't like Reason midis . Thanks

I don't want to say much about this, because the loudness war makes me very sad . It makes no sense to me to put a lot of effort in recording music at the very best quality, and then at the very final step (mastering) destroy everything. It's just incredibly stupid. People who prefer (too) loud tracks should remove the wax out of their ears and then take a good listen again. High volume tracks should be forbidden from OCR. Judges?

I've been wondering about this for years, why doesn't export to midi work? First part of the exported midi seems fine, but after a few bars it gets really messy. Then bars in the song start completely at the wrong time, which obviously messes up the whole song. Why is that? And is there anything i can do about it?

OGG IS LOSSLESS NO ARTIFACTS, N00B! lol Was that a joke? Ogg is lossy, so there WILL be re-encoding artifacts. (i believe you can put flac in an ogg container nowadays so that would be lossless. But i think everyone assumed that we were talking about the lossy Vorbis in an ogg container here).

Here is the wiki link to loudness war: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war 16bits is a huge dynamic range so low volume really DOESN'T do much damage to the music quality. However heavily compressing the dynamic range and clipping does. Besides mp3 doesn't use bitdepth for audio, so you can feed 24bit wavs to your favorite mp3 encoder (lame).

It's because the song is "mastered" way too loud. I replaygained the song and the peak is 1.26 while 1 is the max. The average volume is 11.26dB louder than the recommended 89dB.

I think he only wants to increase the volume of the low volume parts. And he doesn't want to change (destroy) the mid and high volume parts of the song. I'm not sure if you can do this with a compressor though. Compressors affect the high volumes always and not just the low volumes... right?

Read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war Anyway, Reason has a new compressor from version 3. First just increase the master volume as high as possible without clipping. Then put the MClass Maximizer between the mixer and hardware interface. And then you can increase the volume (and decrease the quality) with the input gain button on the Maximizer. I'd say going much higher than 4.5dB will sound like shit. Don't use softclipping, it sucks.

There is nothing wrong with soft sounding tunes. Making it louder will only make the sound worse, never better. So don't use any limiters/compressors or whatever. Those will only destroy the orignal dynamics. As you may notice the louder the songs are, the crappier they sound.

Why would you make something louder at the cost of soundquality. "Professional" recordings are almost always WAAAAAAAAAY too loud, and a lot of soundquality of the original recording has been lost.