the evil of the loudness wars has reached my studio...

Rynlander wrote:I wanted to bump this, mostly because you guys are good. I'm new to recording, but have been a musician for over 20 years. I like to record all by myself, and would like to have some good mastering done by myself. When I upload any songs I'm working on up to soundcloud, if I stay at -8 db, I'm way quieter than others. Is it bad for me to use a limiter to get my songs up to that volume?

No. For a finished produce you can boost the volume in "project" mode with a mastering limiter. Leave yourself about 0.3 dB headroom for conversion to .mp3 since that conversion can cause clipping.

When uploading to soundcloud, unless you're going to sell the song as a download in .wav format, I would suggest doing your own conversion to 320 kbps mp3 before uploading. Their converter does a better job of converting 320 kbps mp3 to 128 kbps mp3 for streaming than it does converting .wav to 128 kbps mp3 for streaming.

thank you