The Audio Blog

You've just finished a mix. You've been sweating hours - no, days - until it's just so. Your levels are good, you've tested everywhere you can and it seem to translate well, from the phone speaker to a full range PA. Hopefully you haven't mastered it yourself, but you like the result that comes from the mastering house (or the mastering friend) and you begin to think the track may be worth publishing. But then you get a little cold feet. You've been listening for hours to the

ASIO4All is a great tool but it's important to understand when it makes sense to use it.

A short post today about something very simple, but sometimes overlooked. The prevalence of DAWs, plugin effects and digital recording has given us amazing tools to play with, and the possibility to reach exceptional quality even with modest means. DAWs and plugins are amazing. Both DAW and plugins, however, are computer applications. Specifically, personal computer application. So what? say you. Well, personal computer applications tend to use a screen. For DAWs, often two o

There's few subjects that seem to provoke as much confusion and misunderstanding as mastering - and this post is about shedding a little light on the subject. Confusion seem to exist on what mastering does and is - especially with digital recordings. As a consequence, misunderstandings abound on how and if it makes sense to apply the step. You find all sort of definitions: some plausible ("mastering corrects errors in your mix"), some quite off ("mastering is where you get th

Well, ok: I lied. DAWs do not destroy recordings. I love DAWs, and we can make wonderful recordings and mixes using any. This post is emphatically not about how analog is better than digital (it isn't). There are, however, two super annoying things about most DAWs. These are the default waveform zoom level and the default meters color coding (when the signal gets from green to yellow to red) in their GUI - i.e. the way they present tracks out of the box, when you've just ins