Hey there everyone,

I am having great difficulty trying to master my cd album which is due to be completed soon.

I have a project studio which is based around a focusrite saffire pro, Cubase Studio 4 and a soundcraft m12 mixer.

I have mixed all my 10 songs within cubase studio 4 and sent them in as mixdowns as a stereo track.

I have then applied the Izotopes 3 plugin to the insert of the stero mix down and have exproted as a 16 bit WAV file at 44.1 KHZ.

I have then burned each file to a cd via windows media player.

This is where the problems starts...

When I listen to the piano parts in a few of my songs on my CD album, I can hear faint hisses as the piano plays.

I can't work out for the life of me what the problem is as I have tried every possible work around including using a differnt audio interface to using dithering plugins to see if it is to do with the bit rate or something related to the exported audio file as when I play the audio file on computer in my studio and play the project file mixdown within cubase, the mixes sound fine.

Please could someone help me out with this problem and point me in the right direction as to what I am doing wrong.

Sorry this is a long article but thanks for reading and please reply to this thread if you can help.

Cheers

Robert J

Hmmm? Just a few thoughts.

I'm not too familiar with the izotopes plug in, but it appears to be a software 'package'. Did you apply the whole gamut of processes across the master buss? To the 10 tracks as a whole? Or individually (as i gather you should?) tailored to each tracks needs then level matched? Possibly the artifacts you hear are being produced at this stage of your particular approach?

I'm no expert, but maybe WMP is not the subjectively (or otherwise?) best thing you could use to burn a cd. This could be to blame in part. Although i've burnt a cd with it without problems before now.

I say this partly because you said it plays fine within cubase as a project file. If i'm understanding correctly that's pre izotope and definitely pre WMP. If so then if you used the blanket approach on your 10 tracks it may have worked out ok overall, but may have not suited the piano parts you mention. But not knowing it's all guesswork. So a dozen different interfaces or dithering softwares aren't going to cure whats occuring earlier in the chain.
Well, you could remedy the hiss afterwards, but why bother with processing the processed!

Then again, if the hissing is really faint and the rest sounds really good, then maybe it's not that bad? One persons hiss can be anothers i cannot really hear anything wrong... If you know what i mean?

Failing that if your reasonably well off get a professional mastering engineer to do it. Though if your getting good results mostly this may not be entirely necessary.

What kind of music is it if you don't mind me asking?

Good luck with it.

Hi

I'm not familiar with the applications you mention - when you say you're using plug-ins, what exactly are you doing to the audio?

Dave

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www.hiltongrovemastering.com

Hi There,

I am prducing Piano Pop Styled Music which I write and Produce, but am having problems with as you may gather.

Just to clarrify, I have no problems with the sound quality even when the stero master track has been exported from cubase studio 4 using izotopes on the insert of that track.

It's only when I burn it to a cd when I get a problem with hiss. Also the hiss is more apparent on personal cd players with headphones than it is on HIFi's with speakers.

Kind Regards

Robert Jeorme

Hi There,

I am using The Izotopes plugin on the insert of the channel which I am using for the stereo mixdown Master track.

Izotopes is making the overall mix more audible to the ear be maximising the volume and compressing the mix ever so slightly.

But I have tried using different plugins and even without applying compression plugins and no plugins at all, But still have the same problems with the hissing.

I have just thought, should I be applying the Izotopes mastering plugin to the master bus insead of the insert of the stereo track or does it make no differece?

Kind Regards

Robert J

how are you importing the files into windows media????
is it possible that the files are being converted to lossy codec while in windows media??? I would check the options on windows media player

have you checked importing the master back into cubase to see if the hiss is there.

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Alex Ivory
http://www.ivorymastering.com

I would try using an alternative CD writing program. You can try Feurio or EAC for free - these will both write the audio accurately without attempting to 'make it sound better'. There are probably plenty of other alternatives which would work just as well too.

Microsoft have employed some extremely clever people to work on the audio processing within Windows and Media Player but mastering is one time when you don't want them sticking their noses in.

Cheers

James.

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JRP Music - Audio Mastering and Restoration.
http://www.jrpmusic.net

Just my opinion but after spendaing lots of money on gear and software, then lots of time on writing, producing, mixing and mastering your work - it seems ill advised to skimp on the final part (burning CD's), when this will let down the whole process if done badly. Invest in something LIKE wavelab, and you'll end up with a far more professional result. imo.

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Baby we were born to run

I reckon it's a lossy converter, the 'whistling hiss' as i call it is a classic artefact from consumer grade compression algorithms. i would check the preferences in WMP and play around.

best of luck

ben

Hi Everybody,

Thank you all so much for all of your suggestions.

I have tried burning cd's using nero 7 and a free app called express burn from the free app Wave Pad.

I only seem to get worse results from my sony personal cd player but If I play the cd in a standard cd player, it sounds better.

could it just be the cd player? as stupid as it sounds.

I can't work out why my other material which I produced on my boss BR 1180 multitrack recorder and burned to cd using the inbuilt cd burner sounds fine on this same sony personal cd player though.

Everyone I asked just said it's just a rubbish CD Player, though I played my cd through an Arcam cd player going through a modern NAD amp and Scott or (Pure Acoustics Speakers) and the cd sounds a little hissy through that system too.

I was just contemplating on whether just to switch to protools LE which would cost me a small fortune but may or maynot solve the issue i am having.

Any suggestions anyone?

I am pulling my hair out! lol

Cheers

Robert J

When you say it sounds 'better' on the 'better' cd player, is this through loudspeakers? And when you infer that it is sounding not so good, is this on headphones?

I'm stating the obvious here, but it's sometimes easy to overlook, no matter how experienced you are!

But as you probably know that hiss is going to show up far more on headphones as opposed to loudspeakers.

Is this hiss quite apparent, or do you have to consciously listen for it? I say that because we are often our own worst critics when producing our own material. Not hearing the offending material makes it hard to judge for us. More stating the obvious there.

Hope you get it sorted to your satisfaction.

Hi there,

The cd sounds better through speakers than it does through headphones. It could also possibly be beacause I am using a good pair of headphones as well.

I would agree that hiss will show up more on headphones than loudspeakers as well.

Also another question,

If I want to get my whole album much louder so that it is about the same volume as comercial recordings, can I do that with consumer equipment or do I need professional grade equipment such as an SSL Mixing Console?

Thanks for your time.

Robert J

Quote Robert.p.jerome:

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If I want to get my whole album much louder so that it is about the same volume as comercial recordings, can I do that with consumer equipment or do I need professional grade equipment such as an SSL Mixing Console?

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You certainly don't need an SSL Mixing Console but you probably need a good mastering engineer and his/her favourite toys!

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http://www.flowmastering.co.uk
http://www.wolfstudios.co.uk

Just pay the bit of cash to have it professionally mastered. Usually (999999/1000000 times) the mastered tracks will come back sparkling.




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So, let's just limit the crap out of it, and boost the high-mids. Like Mudvayne, only without the random noise loosely considered singing...

Quote Robert.p.jerome:

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Hi there,



Also another question,

If I want to get my whole album much louder so that it is about the same volume as comercial recordings, can I do that with consumer equipment or do I need professional grade equipment such as an SSL Mixing Console?

Thanks for your time.

Robert J

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Of course, just reading lines of type and trying to understand fully, you'll understand? But that question speaks volumes to me, if you'll pardon the unintended pun.

The answer of course is no. Not an absolute no, but for mastering as we are discussing and your particular problem.

My best advice now would be take your mixes (at the pre hiss stage) to be professionally mastered. Provided you can afford it and your music is important enough to you to warrant outside assistance.

Oh and try not too get too caught up in the 'my cd has to be as loud if not louder than the rest' trends, thats what volume controls are for.
If you are basically happy with your music and the mixes, then that's a very good thing indeed, whatever the apparent loudness. Just my non exclusive opinion.

I'd say that even if they did have a tiny bit of hiss in places. I'd bet this hiss isn't that bad. Or maybe it is? Apart from this hiss are you happy with your work?

Any chance of hearing a snippet for an impartial view or three? May I ask how long you've been recording your own stuff?

Again, good luck with it.

Hi,

Thanks for looking into this, I agree about limiting it until there is no dynamic range left so that it's louder that anyone else's but it would sound rubbish. LOL

But I will consider getting my album mastered by professionals but I have just spent a lot of money on my recording equipment.

But it can wait I guess.

Cheers

Robert J

Hi There,

I completely understand what you mean.

My music is mostly piano based and some with backing tracks which I created myself. To hear some of my recordings you are more than welcome to go to my website which is www.robertjerome.co.uk

But to hear my pre-mastered recordings I will have to send them to you. But saying that, I have already sent my recordings to other people and have had friends listen to them and they all recon that the hiss is from the Sony personal cd player which I was using with a pair of Bose headphones.

Obviously there is only so much you can do with piano and vocals and I don't intend to make my recordings Very loud, but I would like them as loud as perhaps Elton John's latest album recording "The Captain And The Kid".

But like you say, it is probably only attainable from a professional mastering facility.

At the moment I am using the free W1 Limmiter from KVR Audio.com and it isn't that bad, but you can hear that the songs are limited via a limiter.

But thanks for looking at my problem and let me know if there is anything else that I can do in the meantime.

Cheers

Robert J

Are your master projects running at 24 bit? Are you using the dithering tool in Ozone to get to 16 bit, and if so, what insert are you using in Cubase? I find having the dithering in Insert 7 or 8 which are post fader tends to have the best results.

I have had some scratchy sounding results through poor dithering tools or no dithering.

Just a thought

Hi,

My projects are in 24 bit and I am using the dithering tool in Ozone to dither down to 16 bit and then exporting as a 16 bit wv file at 44.1khz. I am inserting ozone into an insert on the specific track with the stero mixdown on it.

Hope this helps.

Robert J

I think it's the CD Player too. Cheap players use cheap converters, and even cheaper anaologue output stages. All kinds of stuff that shouldn't be there can get added. One old player I used made a really interesting noise just after you put the disc in, as the motor got up to speed...

What speed are you writing the discs at ? If you have a relatively high error rate, and the player is struggling, this might cause problems too. This might explain why other discs play fine, too. I would recommend buring at 2x or 4x only, if possible.

Ian

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Production Advice - unlock the potential of your mix

Hi There,

Yes you are probably right, as I am burning at 40 x or even 52 times sometimes.
I think it's a combo of both things and a rubbish cd player, although it is a sony cd player it was only cheap!

Hey I liked your website, really impressive. Are you on myspace?

I would consider using someone like you for recording in the near future and mastering e.t.c.

Kind Regards

Robert J

Quote Ian Shepherd:

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What speed are you writing the discs at ? If you have a relatively high error rate, and the player is struggling, this might cause problems too. This might explain why other discs play fine, too. I would recommend buring at 2x or 4x only, if possible.
Ian

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Err... Sorry but these days the consensus is that the best burning speed for burning masters with modern CD burners is usually between 8X and 16X as can be verified by error checking software such as Plextools.
The slower burning speeds were recommended only with older (10 years old) burners and some stand alone CD-R recorders!
Burning at 48 or 52 will certainly result in CDs with a lot of jitter which won't be corrected by cheap CD players and result in poor sound.

--------------------
http://www.flowmastering.co.uk
http://www.wolfstudios.co.uk

I assume by "Izotopes", the OP means Ozone 3 (by Izotope).

This is a quite sophisticated suite of mastering processors, and really requires some getting to grips with to get the best results. The hiss you describe sounds like a possible dithering problem to me - or perhaps heavy-handed use of Ozone is exacerbating some noise that is already there?

If you're serious about Ozone, I'd check out all the tutorials on the Izotope site (there are some excellent video tutorials) . Also, I would render your final mixes first, and then put them through Ozone afterwards - rather than using Ozone as a live plug across the master of the project when you're mixing. Ozone is fairly processor hungry when all the units are active, and this could cause problems.

EDIT : I just read Robert's post about his projects being in 24bit, and using Ozone to dither them to 16, and then bouncing out at 16. I would be tempted to try bouncing the mix out from Cubase 4 without Ozone inserted, using the Cubase 4 conversion to bring it down to 16, then try mastering the resulting 16bit file with Ozone. I've had problems in the past when getting into a muddle with multiple bit settings / dithering in Ozone.

Edited by mcguirk (06/06/07 12:48 PM)

Quote DomB:

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Quote Ian Shepherd:

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I would recommend buring at 2x or 4x only, if possible.
Ian

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Err... Sorry but these days the consensus is that the best burning speed for burning masters with modern CD burners is usually between 8X and 16X as can be verified by error checking software such as Plextools.
The slower burning speeds were recommended only with older (10 years old) burners and some stand alone CD-R recorders!
Burning at 48 or 52 will certainly result in CDs with a lot of jitter which won't be corrected by cheap CD players and result in poor sound.

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I think this is a case of "Your Mileage May Vary". You're right - we have Plextor burners here which can an average BLER of less than 5 at 16x burn speeds. Checked in a Clover Systems analyser - Plextools is great for the money but has it's limits.

HOWEVER we also get many CDs a week submitted for replication which we have to reject because of high error rates. We recommend people reduce the speed they write at down to 2x or 4x and this often solves the problem, which is where my advice comes from.

The reason for this I think is that different makes & models of writer "like" different brands of media. It's not even safe necessarily to stick with a certain brand - manufacturers are constantly changing the way discs are manufactured in order to cut costs, and the drive's firmware is seldom updated often enough to cope.

So, unless you're using a Plextor with Taiyo Yuden media, I would still recommend lower burn speeds.

Robert J, glad you liked the site ! We do have a mySpace page, http://www.myspace.com/soundrecordingtechnology I think - although I was just looking at it and it says SRT is a 30-year old female only 1 cm high, so I'm not sure how reliable it is ;-)

48x or 52x is definitely too high, I'm sure that's where your problem is - but you could also try a different brand of disc, for all the reasons above.

If you want to post me a copy of your CD, I'd be happy to take a listen and give you an honest opinion about whether it would benefit from mastering.

Ian

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Production Advice - unlock the potential of your mix

Quote Ian Shepherd:

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HOWEVER we also get many CDs a week submitted for replication which we have to reject because of high error rates. We recommend people reduce the speed they write at down to 2x or 4x and this often solves the problem, which is where my advice comes from... So, unless you're using a Plextor with Taiyo Yuden media, I would still recommend lower burn speeds.
Ian

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High error count can be due to other factors. For instance, many users are not fully aware that popular burning software Toast (except for new version 8.0) is unsuitable for creating proper masters as they will fail the BLER test.

By the way, most modern burners like the ones by Pioneer & Sony as supplied in recent PCs & Macs don't allow burning speeds of 2X or 4X as they are optimised for higher speeds.

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http://www.flowmastering.co.uk
http://www.wolfstudios.co.uk

Quote DomB:

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many users are not fully aware that popular burning software Toast (except for new version 8.0) is unsuitable for creating proper masters as they will fail the BLER test.

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I would be amazed if this was true - as I understand it BLER is entirely determined by the media and burner, software has nothing to do with it.

Quote DomB:

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By the way, most modern burners like the ones by Pioneer & Sony as supplied in recent PCs & Macs don't allow burning speeds of 2X or 4X as they are optimised for higher speeds.

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You may be right, however all the drives we have bought in the last 2 years still write at 4x. Again I think this is a feature determined by the media's speed rating, not the drives, but I don't claim to be an expert - we use DDP Exabyte for production masters, not CDR, so it's not an issue for us.

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Production Advice - unlock the potential of your mix

HI There,

Yes I am using Izotopes 3, and have resulted in using the presets built into Izotopes 3 and George Yong's W1 Limmiter to maximize the sound, although not ideal it makes my recordings much louder though I would like to be able to use Izotopes 3 properly.

I was told that I should also make use of Multi-Band Compression which enables you to compress the relevant frquency band and in turn make that band louder.

Regards

Robert J

Hi There Ian,

Thanks again for your helful input on this matter.

The Cd burner which I am using is a sony Burner which will burn at 52x Max, but I like to use 40x. Now I know that I am better off burning my cd's at 2 to 4X speed, I will try it out. I have also tried different brands of CDR Media including Verbatim and TDK.

Thanks for letting me know your myspace, I will add you as a friend! I have now released my Cd album as I have re-mastered it and it sounds better than it was though not perfect, but What is perfection in a Cd Master?

Best Wishes
Robert J

Out of interest, does anybody know if Pro Tools LE has better sound Quality than Cubase Studio 4.

I am using a Focusrite Saffire Pro at the moment with Cubase Studio 4.

I was contemplating whether I should buy a digi 002 rack or not. I had looked at the 003 rack but it's just that bit too expensive and is much the same as the 002 rack in my opinion.

Is the 002 rack as good as the Focusrite Saffire Pro?

I am asking this becuase I thought that Upgrading to Pro Tools LE would give me better mastering options and mixing options E.T.C.

Cheers

Robert J

I doubt that Protools will sound better - if everything is working properly then it will sound the same. The only reason to switch is if you prefer the way that Protools works over Cubase.

I would add that if you are thinking of switching software then take a look at Reaper before making a choice. It is free to try and costs very little to register yet seems to work very well for general production duties.

Cheers

James.

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JRP Music - Audio Mastering and Restoration.
http://www.jrpmusic.net

Hi Robert, First of all I must apologise if this has been covered but I'm at work and haven't managed to read through the whole thread; however I have had similar issues to you and my experience may or may not help.

I have been running Cubase 4, Wavelab 6 and Izotope Ozone V3. I've been really impressed with the results of all of these products but when using Ozone I seemed to sometimes get a hiss/crackling noise on some tracks.

A typical example was an intro of a song consisting of light drumming and a lone vocal. Volume didn't appear to be an issue but there was a crackle/hiss around each kick drum beat. This did not appear when playing back in Wavelab or Cubase until I mixed down (rendered) in Wavelab and burnt to CD.

To cut a long story short the issue turned out to be simply that my overall mix - despite not clipping on the master bus - was too hot and caused clipping into the Ozone plug-in. Backing off the overall mix seemed to cure this.

This may or may not be related to your issue but it may be worth looking into. I'm still not sure why the sound occurred during mixdown and not playback within the tool but I'm guessing it is related to dithering.

Anyway, hope this is of some use.

Steve

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www.stephenmountford.com