[MLA] Loudness example with distortion on Sound Check

[Bob Katz]

Dear Kevin: Admittedly, there is no one size fits all encoding level. 
But if content producers (mastering engineers) shoot for iTunes' MFIT 
(high bit rate) codec, the vast majority of clipping in all streaming 
will be handled fairly well in my opinion. I personally don't shiv a git 
if it's occasionally too hot for Spotify if we cover MFIT in our coding 
of a master. Spotify deserves what they get with such a low bit rate 
codec they use, and that will improve in due time. As a mastering 
engineer I do not want to shoot for lowest common denominator. And most 
of my sensibly-mastered material will play fine on Spotify with possibly 
only occasional one hit clips. As I've said before, it's impractical to 
make and control too many masters. We're currently lobbying for all 
distributors to send the 2444 MFIT master and send it to all the 
streaming customers. We'd like to see the 1644 originally intended to 
send to CD die a quick death. That's often a dB hotter than the MFIT 
master.

As for attacking both ends and dealing with clipping on the decode side 
I'd like to hear an explanation as to how a streaming service's player 
can deal with (anticipate) a clipping situation and attenuate post 
decoder.... from a moving bitstream. Please start by telling us how you 
would deal with a song that has a clip two minutes after the song has 
already begun...


Best wishes,



Bob


On 10/14/18 6:54 PM, Kevin Gross wrote:
>
> On Sun, Oct 14, 2018 at 8:32 AM Bob Katz <bobkatz at digido.com 
> <mailto:bobkatz at digido.com>> wrote:
>
>
>     In our recent conversations, I pointed out that it's totally
>     impractical to expect or even talk about any streaming player
>     applying attenuation to avoid overs just post the decode stage.
>     Therefore even though the clipping is not baked into a well-made
>     encoder, it has to be the responsibility of the mastering engineer
>     to prevent decoder clipping by reducing the level that will be
>     applied to the encoder if necessary. Mastering engineers have to
>     bake that level into the fixed point file that we supply to the
>     distributors.
>
>
> If you want to fix this pre-encoder, you're going to get content 
> producers to comply with something like Spotify's -2 dBTP suggestion. 
> That means bringing peaks down 4-6 dB compared to where they currently 
> stand at 0 dBFS. I don't see mastering engineers getting behind this. 
> I don't know if we even want to recommend it either because it will 
> result in more squashing.
>
> We should also be raising awareness of the potential for clipping 
> post-encoder and advocating for more robustness in players in this 
> regard.  You're right, we're not going to be able to get all decoders 
> fixed. We're also not going to be able to get all masters fixed. If we 
> work both ends, we'll make the most meaningful progress.
>
> Kevin

-- 

If you want good sound on your album, come to Bob Katz 407-831-0233 
DIGITAL DOMAIN MASTERING STUDIO Author: *Mastering Audio *Digital Domain 
Website <http://www.digido.com/> No trees were killed in the sending of 
this message. However a large number of electrons were terribly 
inconvenienced.

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