Loudness in Acid vs Soundcloud

Matt-Francis wrote on 11/27/2019, 3:31 AM

Can anyone help me with this? My tracks sound nice and loud and clear in Acid. On the Master I'm using the MAGIX limiter on the Dance moderate loudness preset which brings the level right up to -0.1 and there is no distortion. But when I upload to SC it sounds really quiet and I have to bump up the volume on the speakers to get the same level. I know I can get the tracks mastered professionally but was wondering if there was another way.

Comments

emmrecs wrote on 11/27/2019, 3:58 AM

@Matt-Francis

This problem "sounds" (sorry, couldn't resist the pun) from what you say, as if SC is actually deliberately reducing the volume of your track when it is being streamed. I don't use SC so have no knowledge of this but I wonder whether there is a prescribed maximum peak level for tracks uploaded to SC and anything above this threshold is automatically reduced? Is there a guide anywhere on the SC site to the specifications that SC expects files to meet?

Jeff

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Matt-Francis wrote on 11/27/2019, 7:12 AM

I thought that may be the case too but my tracks sound quieter than others on there and apparently SC don't do any normalisation.

Graham-Hawker wrote on 11/27/2019, 7:46 AM

I know I can get the tracks mastered professionally but was wondering if there was another way.

In this sort of case I always think of the advice I read from a sound engineer. If it is too quiet or loud for you please use your volume control.

The alternative is to use lots of compression to remove any dynamic range which is modern method of making stuff loud/ruining your music*

*delete as appropriate.

Djronrella wrote on 11/27/2019, 8:58 AM

I thought that may be the case too but my tracks sound quieter than others on there and apparently SC don't do any normalisation.

Go to Soundcloud help page about uploads in Soundcloud!! They recommend uploading Flac file due to best highest quality of no loss!

Most uploaded files lose lots of playback qualities!

Hope this helps

sheppo wrote on 12/2/2019, 9:33 AM

If you bring your rendered audio back in to acid, do you see the waveform essentially peaking at max volume? It sounds like you know what you're doing, but just to check you've not got the level of the master bus set wrong, or some other plugin is affecting the levels..