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.

I'd use lame 3.96.1 with APS (v2). Plz also release it in lossless

No, that's not what i meant, although it sounds quite nice. I mailed my example to you. Get it here

Ok, i had another incredibly bright idea to make an panning delay (this one is better than my post on the first page of this thread, hehe). This time i made a 2 steps delay that pans from left to right to left to right etc (NOT a 3 steps delay and a 4 steps delay combined, that would be the easy way out, hehe). EDIT: download it here Anyway, here we go: - create a mixer as usual - create a 3 delay unit underneath - set the first delay to 2 steps and we'll name the delay "first left delay" and set the FEEDBACK button to 0 - set the second delay 4 steps and name it "left delay" and set the DRY/WET button to the middle. - set the third delay to 4 steps and name it "right delay". Don't change anything else on this one. Now press tab and we will connect the wires correctly to aux 1 of the mixer: - disconnect all wires from the delays to the mixer (to avoid confusion) - connect Aux Send Out 1 Left to "first delay left" left input - connect Aux Send Out 1 Right to "right delay" left input - connect Aux Return 1 Left to "left delay" left output - connect Aux Return 1 Right to "right delay" left output And finally the wires between the delays: - connect "first left delay" left output to "left delay" left input - connect "first left delay" right output to "left delay" right input That's it! (I hope i didn't forget anything) I was kinda surprised that it worked so good myself, hehe

NICE! You might wanna change the ratio of the compressor imo. Can you replicate that rave synth you hear in "Prodigy - Smack My Bitch" up too? The one that starts at 0:21 in the 5:43 version of the song. I always wanted to use such a synth . ELSE I might give it a try myself...

THX! I realized that i had to select the samples first to make that button work. I never really toyed with the NN-XT before...but i'm starting to get the hang of it...now.

How do you make the velocity of NN-XT instruments work like usual? I want to change the volume with velocity, but right now it just makes the notes a bit duller when i set the velocity to 0. thx...

they've all been updated? That explains it...

Well, i have almost every ocremix. Then i tried the bittorent and alot of files turned into 0kb files. Apparently it tries to redownload more than half of the total remixes. I can hardly believe that more than half of my files is not the same as the ones in the torrent and have to be redownloaded.

I lost 75 of my files with the torrent. So my question is: what happens if a file has the same name but not the same size? Will it be overwritten? that would explain it.

Hi, i was messing with the Malstrom synthesizer and i was wondering about if i can let the mod kick in after a second or so. At this moment the instrument has mod the whole time, from start to end, but that is not what i want. Of course i can manually set the mod value of the controller, but that is a lot of work if i have to do it with each note btw. I'm not sure if anyone is interested but I myself had a good idea for making panning delay (from left to right or right to left): 1. Make 2 delay thingies. 2. Connect the left source to one and connect the right source to the other (if you got a mono source, use the spider to split it to 2 channels). 3. Connect the left output to the left input of the mixer and connect the right output to the right input of the mixer (duh). 4. Make sure the settings of the 2 delays are the same. Except for feedback. If you increase feedback of the right channel delay, the delay will move from left to right. Pretty neat eh?