Has anyone any experience with this issue? I have even created Masters out of my final mixdowns, to boost the volume, and in those I duplicated the Track witch gives me a bit extra. All-in-all, while it sounds good in the headphones, it is about 15% quieter than the industry norm as soon as I put it into a car or other stereo. I am doing everything I can to avoid clipping, but to get the volume out of the final mixdown-masters I have to ignore the clipping.
HELP!
Is there a http://www.garageband.com website for help with using it? If you find out there come back and tell us what you learned.
There will always be another song to be written. Someone will write it. Why not you? http://www.garyeandrews.com
Yah, this is normal and its an issue that is not limited to garage band - any DAW is like that. There is an art to creating an industry competitive sounding master, people who specialize in putting that loudness and polish and sizzle on the final product. Its hard to argue that this is the best route if you can afford the servces of one of the best practioners. But its not the only route.
There is a bit of controversy, which I guess I’m going to fuel by suggesting that you check out the Ozone 5 product from Izotope. You can download a free 30 day trial, which if nothing else its presets will let you get a lot closer to the sound you want than Garage Band by itself. And some Grammy Award winning Engineer/Producers have used it to so some amazing stuff.
The industry norm is to overly compress everything in the mastering stage. That gives the music a higher average gain (loudness). Look up “loudness wars” on Google and read about it. Loud doesn’t equal good when it comes to your final product.
