Here's today's list of uncertainties in case someone competent has some time to spare.

1. In C6 - is it best to bounce in realtime or offline? I've had conflicting advice on this.

2. Usually encoding MP3 are not a problem. But today I get a situation where my output levels seem fine(-0.3 dB) but the encoded MP3 comes back more than 1.5 dB louder. What might be going on?

3. Is C6 any good at encoding MP3s? It doesn't sound like it is to me, I'm usually disappointed, but I haven't tried an alternative.

4. How do I get LAME? (Other than by not paying my debts). Who has a simple implementation of the source code that I can just load up and use?

Thanks for any guidance.

I'm not a Cubase user so these answers are more general but...

1. It shouldn't make any difference unless you have a plug-in that uses some kind of separate timing input that will only work in real time. I can't think of any off the top of my head but I seem to remember hearing that certain obscure plug-ins only work properly in real time.

2. You're possibly seeing inter-sample peaks. Certain waveforms can be sampled before and after the true peak value with the samples giving legal values but the actual value of the peak can be much higher than the samples. In normal playback the true peak value will only be realised when the signal has passed through the DAC's reconstruction filter. The filtering used by mp3 can exacerbate this problem and also cause peaks where none existed before. The best advice is, if you are converting to mp3, don't go too close to 0dBFS.

3. I don't know - I use LAME.

4. Look for a program called Razor Lame - it came with my copy of lame_enc.dll when I downloaded it.

James.

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

Thanks James. Very helpful. I can't believe this is intersample peaks but I'll check in case I've blundered somehow. I've never had the problem before.