(Untitled)

[cassandraleo]

So I stayed up all night again, even though I have work in slightly over ten hours (I'll be heading off to bed shortly). Mostly this was because I've been editing audio files. I've been going through poorly mastered CDs (which these days seems to be most of them) and correcting the various flaws to the best of my ability. The free audio editor

Comments

[cassandraleo]

It usually results from mastering an album too loudly. Digital audio has a threshold from, let's say, -32,768 to 32,767 (which is about right for sixteen-bit audio), which represent the vertical position of the waveform at any given time. If the analogue value of the waveform is above 32,767 or below -32,768 at any point along the waveform, it gets cut down to 32,767 or -32,768, which produces audible distortion. However, a lot of record labels seem to be doing this on purpose, because there are several songs on various records where the waveform is clipped much below the threshold.

Hopefully that makes sense. Here's a video comparing compressed audio to non-compressed audio, although I'm not sure whether the samples they used were clipped or compressed in some other manner.

And yeah Porcupine Tree is pretty awesome.