I'm going to buy the Ozone 4. Since my wife is a student, we can get the educational version which is $125.

My tech at Sweetwater told me that Ozone 4 has a feature that it can analyze the effects like compression levels and whatnot on a CD of your choosing, and apply those effects to your mix! If that's true, then it sounds too good to be true.

DNJ: I'd like to make a really high quality demo to impress people in the industry, and to have high quality material at my website. The Mixcraft software sounds comparable to Cakewalk Sonar which doesn't have mastering effects like limiters and maximizers.

For me, $125 is affordable, and I think it will improve my mixes substantially.

Beakybird

Good luck Larry hope you do well.

I used Sound Forge on my first demos a few years ago. It took me awhile to learn, some trial and error whether to choose the peak value or the RMS and then scanning the song and diddling around a lot with things like dithering I think it was called.
http://ScottLMusic.com/Listen

A few months ago I was putting up some demos of me and Chuck. I tried Sound Forge again and it was hit and miss again. I guess with some effort I would have gotten it under control again, but I didn't want to put in a bunch of time doing it. Hoping I'd find a quick fix I did. I used Audacity a free recording software with all the plug-ins a guy should need. It has only a couple choices for normalizing, so I checked the appropriat box and normalized all the tunes. To me they all came out pretty good except a couple which I manually set the volume control in Sound Forge, I think it was.
http://ScottLMusic.com/Chuck_Wheeler

The problem with this normalizing is it depends on all the factors in each recording. If they are done with a similar setting and sounds etc it is easy to do and fine. But when you've got something different going on like when I did Take The A Train as a big band number with no vocals, the peaks are different.

MP3 Gain is another free program that will normalize mp3's only and it takes into account that some songs are perceived as loud or softer when in fact the waveforms tell you something else. I know DJ's like to use this on their thousands of mp3's.

I'd sure try the free approach first myself

Scott

Mastering isn't really rocket science, unless you are trying to rescue a bad recording and mix.

As long as you concentrate on making the mix sound as good and well balanced as you possibly can, it's generally a piece of cake to bring up it's average level to close to contemporary standards (although some of the hottest of the hot levels can be a problem, but who wants to sound THAT loud, anyway? ).

Spend most of your time and effort there first, and the mastering will take care of itself.

Don't forget, also, that most MP3 library players (iTunes, etc.) have functions which average out the levels of different MP3's, so you don't need to crush your recording to death to make it loud. The whole 'volume wars' thing that is going on right now was an effort by marketing people in the industry to make sure that their CD's (NOT mp3's) jump out from a pile of other CD's when played quickly by a radio station programmer (louder is, generally, perceived as better, up to a point).

The trouble is, of course, that first, the radio station's broadcast compressors won't let it get loud on air, and your average music listener nowadays takes the CD home, and immediately converts it to MP3's in their iTunes library and rarely ever even PLAYS the damn CD! Whereupon, the iTunes software turns it down a bit to match all the other tracks, and you have lost whatever dubious gain you might have got, crushing the dynamics in the first place

Hopefully, sanity will return to the industry in the light of this trend, and we can go back to music that actually USES a fair bit of standard CD's dynamic range of about 96db, rather than squeezing it down to the paltry few that most modern label releases use...

Anyway, I'm glad I started this thread, because I didn't know a thing about any of this mastering stuff. All I knew was normalizing. I didn't think it got any louder than that. It will be interesting to play with some of the other toys that come with the Ozone 4 just to see what they do.

Thanks to everyone who enlightened me.

Beakybird

I use Nero WaveEditor, part of the Nero8 Suite. Works fine for me. Just my 2 cents worth...