27 thoughts on “The Loudness War And Why iPods Are Ruining Music”

  1. I don't know if this has anything to do with what he is talking about but I've noticed that a lot of the top pop music these days are very noisy. They have too many sounds playing at the same time or it's over compressed or something.

  3. I totally agree. But how loud should it be? Is there a site or organization out there that provides some sort of loose guidelines. An anti-loudness wars organization?

  5. Bands now commonly compress their instruments and vocals at the point of recording – it makes life easier for the player and the recordist. Then somebody mixes the take and applies compression to parts of it. Then, during mastering, the whole thing is compressed for loudness. Then a radio station broadcasts it – through their compressors. It's hardly surprising that most popular music is mush. Oh, and guess what your ears do when exposed to really loud noise? They compress it.

    Obviously, the best thing would be to engineer with a decent dynamic range and fit music players with optional compressors as an addition to the EQ systems, to be dialled in for those listeners who like mush. I can't help feeling that part of the attraction of so-called 'lo-fi' music is that it is less compressed than the mainstream.

  6. ive been thinking about that album point for a while and its true, peoples attention span is so short these days, they enjoy the gimmick till they move on to the next catchy/clever track. I try and resist doing what people want and just make music i would want to hear.
    http://www.soundcloud.com/roembach

  7. I fully agree. I think many people underestimate the effects that could come with using a compressor as a common tool which should be applied whenever you need it.

  9. The man is really making some good points in that video. I have ruined a lot of my tracks by trying to make em sound as loud as my 'competitors', but after watching that video, I decided not to bother anymore. Like he said, there's no point.

  10. Car stereos and iPods should come with a "loudness" slider, which would dial in compression and normalization as you need it (for listening to music in noisy environments).

    That would work a lot better than squashing everything up front.

  11. It isn't like record companies have to ship out a single, physical product anymore. It is 2010. Give the consumers some options. If you want to send the ultra compressed version to radio stations, fine, do that. You can even still sell that version if you want, but it doesn't cost anything to distribute digital files. Offer the record company version, and a version the mastering engineer feels is the best representation of the music, and let the consumer decide.

  12. If engineers could agree on a volume, then they could start a non-profit and copyright a "Seal of approval" for songs meeting the requirement.

  15. This technology calculates the RMS of a given file and enters an attenuation amount in the metadata of the MP3 file. Note, this is not a destructive edit, merely an instruction to the client software to play back the file with the gain adjusted by that amount. For a small number of files where the RMS does not vary, there won't be that much of difference. However, for large libraries that encompass many types of music over a wide variety of time, the difference accumulates, and the amount of gain reduction will increase. At this point, you're basically compromising your bit depth upon playback of the heavily penalized files.

    I don't consider this a solution.

  16. The consumer already decided and they're buying these hypercompressed tracks.

    Unfortunately, the loudness war isn't a problem to the average listener.

  17. Its not a contest to see who is the loudest. Its a contest to see who's mix "feels" the best. The end user can bump it as loud as they want. If you know what you are doing, you make a mix with the "Apparent Volume" that competes with the "Industry Standard" anyway. I've learned to use the Eyes as well as the Ears and Meters to tell me if I am overcompressing into the "Pumping" sound you guys are referring to.

  18. So we get less quality on our overcompressed tracks, with no packaging, and limited rights to usage, at the same price point? Good thing everyone defended the industry against those thieving hackers, which btw, have recently been supply people with lossless, at a much more reasonable price.

  19. All of those techniques you described have been common in recording for the last 50 years, it ’s the overuse of them, and new technology that allows them to be pushed further.

  23. There's enough fantastic, non-conformative, awe-inspiring, beautifully recorded music out there for any real music fan to never have to deal with any of the subjects raised in this post/video. Just never, repeat never, turn on a radio and you're golden. Total meh.

  25. The loudness war is soooo depressing. Virtually all modern releases are now way too loud, no dynamic variation, no subtleties. I bought the new Santana a couple of days ago. I've listened to it once, it was such hard work. I shan't put it on again. Compression like this removes all the groove, rhythm, feel and space. Even more depressing, digital re-masters of older recordings are now also being squashed, as well as being EQd to up the top above 4kHz, remove the middle at about 250 – 500Hz and up the bottom below 80Hz. And their deleting older masters as they relese these abortions. If you have a good enough record player and undamaged vinyl, try comparing new re-masters with older releases. In most cases its properly shocking. If you want to hear truly high quality sound, buy a really good record deck and invest in some old vinyl.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *