"Roberts, Wes" wrote:
Wow, I always wondered why I saw the winamp graphics equalizer show the dancing waveform as level and at the top of the range of loudness.
But these songs always sounded the best.
Before I read your email I even wanted to know how to make my own songs like that.
Should I still do it, (not to point of clipping).
It's hard to do it right in software. You can use tools like Cool Edit Pro, which sounds the best, but that's tedious. Most people just use what's available in their ripping software to merely normalize tracks, which isn't really the same as compression. A lot of these kind of encodes sound very boomy and distorted. I think the normalize function in AudioGrabber is flawed in some way as a matter of fact. Read the specifics of that somewhere, but the main problem is that it's using a crude and fast algorithm to merely get the job done and nothing more.
But I take Anthony's view on this matter:
"To me material that has been dynamically compressed too much sounds boring. The ear gets used to it, same as it gets used to too much treble boost and you yawn after a few minutes."
I like to minimize the flaws in badly mastered discs, but for discs that are made well--meaning no dynamic compression or clipping--I like to keep it untouched (except for encoding into a 256kbps or VBR MP3 file of course).