First track out of the Korg DS-10

[Absintize]

Uploaded a few minutes ago...

Why is the quality less good than hearing this through the DS or Logic?

Don't know..
However, how the title itself says, it's kind of an exploration of some electronic sounds I managed to get with a basic use of the software, I'm working already on something better, but this sound pretty to me
Can't wait to hear your advices and critiques!

[8-bot]

I like the sounds you've managed to do, especially the panning sound!

[Absintize]

Thanks man!!

[Syscrusher]

Nice first go! Classic electronic effects going on. I enjoyed that.

[Absintize]

Thanks so much!

[D A Payne]

Why is the quality less good than hearing this through the DS or Logic?

I find this is often the case with soundcloud, they do a lot of compression for bandwidth purposes. As far as I know there's not much that can be done about it though.

[Absintize]

understood

[DifficultListening]

Funky! Love to know how you got that shimmering sound at 2:10 (it also pops up earlier).

As for Soundcloud, I think that if you leave them a bit more headroom they don't mess the sound around as much. Their FAQ talks about needing at least 3dB headroom in the source track to minimize artifacts in the compressed track, but I'm giving them 5 or 6dB and I think it's sounding better.

I suspect that if Soundcloud have to resample the track you can also run into some issues with limited headroom, so my upload format is now 44.1kHz.

Anyway, your first track is leagues ahead of what my first track was like - good show!

[Absintize]

Wow, thanks man!

Concerning headroom, you mean I have to give more db of volume to the track? The problem would be I think mixing sounds in the right way in order not to make the song clip, right?
Or maybe I didn't understand so much the headroom story, sorry!

[Absintize]

I don't remember exactly how I did that sound, however, I'm gonna check it ahah
You mean the "wrlwrl" sound that goes down in the octave?

Surely is something I've found playing around with Kaoss Pad 3, but I have to check how I set it exactly

[DifficultListening]

Concerning headroom, you mean I have to give more db of volume to the track? The problem would be I think mixing sounds in the right way in order not to make the song clip, right?
Or maybe I didn't understand so much the headroom story, sorry!

No worries - think of headroom in terms of walking down a corridor with a low ceiling. If there is little headroom, you can bump your head if you walk with a bit of a spring in your step. Likewise in audio, the headroom is how much volume range you allow between the peak amplitude in your track and 0dB, which is, broadly speaking, full scale for digital recording, and the end of the linear region ["saturation"] for tape recording. (It's more nuanced for tape, because sometimes people will record drums with intentional saturation because it can fatten the drum sounds up, whereas digital clipping just sounds like crap). You also have to be aware of the difference between peak amplitude and loudness - your track can sound quiet and still have peak amplitudes close to 0dBFS.

The trick is, that if you use up all the volume available to you, then if that audio is later resampled or lossily compressed, it is possible to create peaks which actually clip, because of stuff like Gibbs phenomena. That's why Soundcloud recommend at least 3dB of headroom. I've been giving 5-6dB as reported by Reaper's per-track peak meter when I record the DS. Having just read the dBFS article on Wikipedia and seeing that there is not even complete agreement on what 0dBFS actually is, I ought to find out whether Reaper is actually reporting peak amplitude or loudness...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbs_phenomenon has some good diagrams of the sort of overshooting that can make digital audio sound terrible when you push the levels a bit hard and then process the audio some more. If you really want to find out how deep the digital recording rabbit hole goes, http://www.digido.com/articles-demos.html has some great articles about quantisation noise and roundoff errors and all the other things that made some early "DDD" CDs sound pretty woeful [*cough* like the original pressing of Peter Gabriel's "Security" *cough*], because they were multitracked and mixed and mastered all on 16-bit gear.

Hmm, I should ask Soundcloud whether there is a way to upload an MP3 to them that they don't have to do any transcoding on _at all_. That way, at least people could be sure that what they hear on their own machine is what people will hear when they access it via Soundcloud. Digital audio has certainly made it cheaper to do recording, but I wouldn't say it has made things simpler...

[DifficultListening]

I don't remember exactly how I did that sound, however, I'm gonna check it ahah
You mean the "wrlwrl" sound that goes down in the octave?

Surely is something I've found playing around with Kaoss Pad 3, but I have to check how I set it exactly

I think that's it, yes.

[Absintize]

I'm goin' to read all your links to better understand this subject.

One question...so what do you mean, when you speak of leaving a certain amount of dB's? You mean not to push the volume in the final mixing of things to the maximum?
To put it really simple: I have synth 1 in the first channel of the Korg DS Mixer. I don't set his volume to the max? In this way I am "leaving headroom" ?

I ask because I think I'm understanding the problem, but not the basic "leaving headroom" thing (I'm italian, maybe is that I've never heard the expression before )

[DifficultListening]

One question...so what do you mean, when you speak of leaving a certain amount of dB's? You mean not to push the volume in the final mixing of things to the maximum?
To put it really simple: I have synth 1 in the first channel of the Korg DS Mixer. I don't set his volume to the max? In this way I am "leaving headroom" ?

I ask because I think I'm understanding the problem, but not the basic "leaving headroom" thing (I'm italian, maybe is that I've never heard the expression before )

Sorry, my apologies for not being clearer and being a bit too technical. I can make a quick reply now - I spent most of the last two days hitting mud with a stick (I'm a nerd that has to do farm work on weekends) and feel like crap. Actually there may already be posts on this forum that cover this stuff better, so have a look around.

The levels that I was talking about were levels in the recording software that you use to record your DS-10 tracks. I think you said you are using Logic. I use Cockos Reaper, because it was cheap to register.

The loudness of the sound that ends up in your mp3 that you upload to Soundcloud is a combination of a few things:
- the levels you set in the DS-10 mixer. These are not calibrated in decibels, you just have to use your ears. Part of what you have to listen for is if you push all the levels up in the DS-10 mixer, it will not clip from going over 0dB full scale, instead it "saturates" a bit like an old tape deck. If each instrument in your song is loud, and then you set the levels high in the mixer, you will hear this effect. When it is extreme, everything starts to sound kind of squashed and distorted/fuzzy, but not actually clipped like real digital clipping. I try to be a bit restrained with the DS-10 mixer because I like my tracks to have more dynamics in them.
- the input gain you set when you record the DS-10 track into your computer - that may be a real knob on your audio interface (mine is, it's a Lexicon Lambda), or a software control. You probably set this to be as high as you can get without clipping - that's a pretty standard thing to do.
- the output level that you set when you turn the track into an MP3 for uploading to Soundcloud. When I do this in Reaper, it shows me the levels as it zooms through encoding the track with LAME, and holds the highest peak level so that I can see it when the process finishes. This is where you need to make sure that you have at least 3dB of headroom, by making sure that the peak level in your output track is lower than -3dB.

Because you say that it sounds fine in Logic, I am guessing that if you can get the levels in the uploaded mp3 to work better with how Soundcloud transcode it, you might be happier with how it sounds when you stream it from Soundcloud. Try encoding a few copies at different levels, and upload them so you can hear what Soundcloud does with them - you can always delete them if they aren't better than your original upload...

[Absintize]

Thank you for the reply!
I have to do some tries, then I'll get my method, as you say! Thanks!

[DifficultListening]

The other thing I should mention is that I've been uploading 320kbit/sec MP3s produced by the LAME encoder in Reaper, and now that I'm leaving 5-6dB of headroom, I'm pretty happy with the results. Soundcloud suggest a lossless source in their FAQ entry (below), but frankly I get tired of waiting for the files to upload, not to mention that people are less likely to download my tracks that they already would be... From the Soundcloud FAQ:

Why does my song sound glitchy?
This rarely happens but if it does, we suggest uploading in 320kbps 44.1kHz with at least -3db of headroom.

This will produce the best results. MP3s will have more pronounced recoding artifacts and lossless formats will be slightly better.

[Absintize]

ok...
All this talking is still valid if speaking of wave files, right? because that first track, I uploaded it in wave.

But I think it's the same story, right?

[DifficultListening]

It should be an even better story - a 44.1kHz wav or flac file, with enough headroom, should be the best case. It's just a bit slow to upload and bulky to download (if you allow that).

I originally used flac, which was at least a bit less bulky than wav, but decided in the end that the quicker upload/download for a 320kbit/sec mp3 was more important; the audio specs for the DS-10 itself are not that great, and frankly neither are my ears anymore, so if 320kbit/sec mp3 sounds as good as it did in my headphones or on my Squeezebox Boom when recording, that's good enough for me, as long as the transcoding to 128kbit/sec at Soundcloud doesn't make it too much worse. I always let people download the original, so anyone really keen can do that. A couple of people have.

[Absintize]

I would only like to say I did not forget this awesome forum, it's simply I never had the possibility to put myself into korg ds-10 again because I still have to buy my own Nintendo DS and at the time of my first track I was in Paris with the DS of my little brother!
But soon I'll buy a Nintendo 3DS in Rome, so I'll come back to this little but awesome software!
Keep the forum up!!

[Cfgk24]

AARGH! You need to buy a non-european 3ds so you can play korg ds10+