Track Compressor Question

John_Logan wrote on 2/9/2003, 4:53 PM

How do I use the track compressor on only individual tracks without using it on every track? So far it only seems to work on all tracks. This seems to be a problem when compiling tracks from recent cd's and older cds. The newer cds are mastered at such levels that they clip.

Comments

Geoff_Wood wrote on 2/9/2003, 6:58 PM

You can insert the compressor plugin in each event's own plugin chain instead of the 'Master'.

Many new CDs are very compressed. This generally shows up as 'lots of shaded area' on the display *envelope* that looks 'squared' before zooming in to see the actual waveform. This doesn't necessarily translate to clipping on any waveform, but on badly mastered CDs waveforms can be clipped.

geoff

jorgensen wrote on 2/10/2003, 12:28 PM

To use compression on individual tracks, each track must be represented as an event.
Events in CDA is essential for changing sound per track, so check it out in the pdf manual and learn it throughout - use the split function to make more events.

Using compression on 'clipped' tracks wouldn't do anything, because they are not clipped - but heavily [digital] compressed to gain a high volume for radio transmissions etc.

What you can do about the high sounding tracks is to lower the volume for the track (point just below the timeline and when the up/down/hand cursor shows drag the volume envelope down). Then click on the 'Event-FX' icon for the track and choose 'Sonic clipped peak restoration' to restore the 'clipped' peaks. (not sure if this FX is part of CDA)

An alternative is to use a parametric equaliser and lower the sound around 4kHz.
Ozone is a great tool for this, as it also will allow you the smoothen the sound after having removed some of the [heavy sound]

BTW. I really miss the feature of using realtime FXs on Siren to compensate for all these bad mastered CD's. Why are so many sound engineers tonedeaf?

stusy wrote on 2/11/2003, 4:39 PM

They've lost all their highs and cover it up by bumpin up the woof...hey, eventually we all, and I mean ALL, lose our high hello...but it's sorta like havin polyps...