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Mastering for car playback?

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shadowfax1007:
Does anyone here specifically master for playback in their car?

There are some recordings of mine I'd like to listen to in the car, but I'm thinking would benefit from some general compression or loudness mastering. Specifically for shows that have a mix of loud songs and quiet songs, I'd like them to all be at relatively the same volume. I'm also keen to do this in a quick and dirty way instead of manual envelope edits if possible.

Does anyone here currently do something similar and care to share their methods? This edits are solely for my own use, I always share my normal masters on DIME etc.

Chanher:
I do a lot of similiar style mastering for bands who will be primarily listening on earbuds, bluetooth speakers and the car. I am certainly no professional, but I like to do some compression, then a nice hard limit (I know, it seems sacrilege; you're literally cutting out all those wonderful dynamic peaks that we work so hard to capture accurately and with fidelity), followed by normalization. I encourage you to try it and tell me if you don't still enjoy the recording, especially on a limited playback system. With cars especially, even cars with nice sound systems, I find the background noise of the engine/road being a detriment to audience recording enjoyment.

The compressor presets in your DAW software are your friend. Try a few different presets until you hear one that you think improves the sound. Then run a limiter that chops off all the peaks, you'll need to experiment with each show to find the right amount, but I'll set the limit to anywhere from -5 to -15. By chopping off all those really tall peaks in the waveform (often snare hits, depending on the music) it allows normalization to bring everything up to consumer level playback.

I first started experimenting with this kind of mastering in the early 2000's when all I had was a 16-bit recorder (Nomad Jukebox 3!). There's obviously less bits to work with and that sometimes left less than desired results. But now with 24-bit and 32fp recorders being the norm, you have a little more wiggle room for this kind of stuff. Since this is just for your own personal use, experiment a bunch. Try a few different compressor presets. Fiddle with the amount of limit and try a few on the extreme side to see how it sounds and soon enough you'll find your own personal sweet spot.

fireonshakedwnstreet:
In addition to the good advice above, I would add a good starting point for bus/mastering compression is 30ms attack/100ms release. It's relatively gentle compression that will catch the real tall peaks, but let the initial transient through. The release is relatively fast, so it will allow to keep the punch. If you have like an SSL style bus compressor plugin, just use the auto release. Set the sidechain filter on the compressor to like 100-150hz or so to keep the lows out of the compression circuit and avoid pumping. I would try to get 2-3db of compression. Then run your limiter of choice (the louder you want it, the better limiter you will need, so don't smash it too hard) and normalize. 

Gutbucket:
Biggest problem in a car is the high level of background noise obscuring the quiet parts unless the volume is cranked. Best way to reduce the dynamic range of the recording to adapt for that is parallel compression (bottom-up compression), which will increase the level of the quiet parts without effecting the dynamics of the loud parts or peaks.  The quiet stuff is made audible over the road noise while the louder stuff isn't made any louder than it was previously.  The details are brought up while the liveliness of the peaks remain unsquashed.

That approach will sound far more natural and engaging than attempting to squash the peaks down with limiting / top-down compression enough to achieve a similar reduction in dynamic range.

The need for doing more than that will depend on the recording.  An AUD recording of the PA sound will already be effectively limited at the top-end without extraneous peaks, unless the audience reaction is louder than the music. When the audience is louder than the music, or if the recording was made at the stage-lip or on-stage where the dynamics of things like the drum kit are significantly wider with far bigger peaks, it can help to do a bit of limiting to manage the handful of highest/wildest peaks first, then normalize, since those errant peaks will tend to drive average levels down significantly.  On its own, limiting those peaks won't make it sound better, but will provide room for the normalization and the parallel compression to bring up the average level and the lower level parts.  If trying to do it using limiting/top-down compression alone, its going to be difficult to get it sounding transparent given the amount of dynamic range reduction required.

But if you want to do the best you can, using a combination of dynamic reduction techniques like that is a good idea, as it will make the most of the bottom-up / parallel compression.  But almost all the audible improvement will be from the bottom-up part.  Just be aware that bottom-up / parallel-compression is going to increase level of all the quieter elements, good and bad, which includes the ambient noise floor, audience chatter, etc.

 

Chanher:
Thanks for the compression insight guys, compression settings are intimidating to me. I'm definitely still learning. I'm going to mess with parallel compression this evening. I do notice the unnaturalness of limiting too much. You can really hear it during the loud parts.

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