hey there people! sorry for my sluggish response, i got a bit distracted by other things for a while. but i'll make up for it with a really long post.
anyway, i'm totally up for mastering this project still, yes.
let's talk what would be ideal:
first off, if possible please send me a dry mix of your song. by which i mean a version of your song with no mastering compressor, no final equalizer, etc. the less stuff that you've done to the final mix the better i can do my part in mastering this project. this also goes for a reverb over the final mix. preferably turn it off as well unless it serves a very important artistic purpose. a very subtle limiter on the end is okay.
for those of us who have used a sequencer (like cubase, nuendo, fruityloops, sonar, etc) this should be easy to do if you have your project file still. you can then also easily render your project at my desired 32bit floating point @ 96KHz wave file*.
for those of use who've recorded it in
real life this could be a bit trickier. as you probably didn't have a high resolution recording device available for you to use. if you did then i'd gladly accept that file but if not we'll make due with what you've got. again, a dry version is very much preferred.
so what to send me - ideally a dry mix with the following specifications:
format: wave files, omf-projects, aif or
losslessly compressed wave files with either
wavpack or
flac.
bit depth: 32bit floating point (preferably).
sample rate: 96,000Hz (preferably).
this is the preferred setting but if you for example have a 24bit 96KHz or that is also great. and even a 16it at 48KHz is better than standard cd audio.
please
do not go up sampling / increasing the bit value if you only have a lower resolution file! for example converting a cd quality 16bit @ 44.1Khz file to 32bit at a higher sample rate is no use at this stage. you gain no quality but do have a massive increase in file size.
also, if you still only have an mp3 please do not convert it to wave! again there will be no increase in quality cause what is lost can never be returned so we might as well keep it small and easy to distribute to me.
*your sequencer host, if not ancient can probably export high resolution files. however, your setup may not be capable of playing back those high resolution files. sometimes they don't play at all and other times they sound horribly distorted and/or clicking popping like it's chinese new year. this does not mean that the render is bad but rather that your hardware is not capable of playing them back properly.
please note that those high resolution files that i'm asking for are also very big. for example 60seconds of stereo white noise @ 16bit, 44.i1KHz takes up 10.8mb while 60seconds of stereo white noise @ 32bit float, 96KHz takes up 43.94mb. however the increase of sound quality makes this a very worthwhile trade off.
distribution:
to make distribution a bit interweb friendlier we can use
lossless compressors to pack up our wave files.
for wave files with a higher bit depth than 16bit i recommend using
wavpack
for cd quallity (16bit, 44.1KHz) wave files i recommend
flac as in my experience it tends to yield better compression ratios than wavpack at lower bit depths.
still the final files will be rather large. please be aware of that.
i can easily accept files through yousendit, rapidshare (or such) or download them from an ftp server. you may need to split up your file over multiple archives using zip or rar to be able to send it through those services but that is fine with me.
or indeed burn a cdr and use the postal service.
i gotta catch a train now... so no time to remove redundancies in this post now.
