Confused on the volume

[Perswayable]

Hi there. I have an MP3 I am recording over. I am on Windows 10. When I look at the playback level, it is in the red. It sounds decent on the computer when I listen to the mp3 on my phone it is super loud and distorted. I tried lowering amplitude, increasing compressor, etc but none of that changes the fact it is red in the playback. Even if I compress the entire thing and the blue waves are small, the playback is in the red. This happens with the music portion before even recording my vocals.

I used compressor and amplitude to make sure my vocals could be heard over various aspects of the track, but how do I lower both tracks so the playback is not in the red? I think that is why the audio comes out weird on MP3 via phone.

[Trebor]

Check you haven't accidentally moved the track-gain slider to the right ...



ditto playback-volume slider ...

[DVDdoug]

but how do I lower both tracks so the playback is not in the red?

Use the Amplify or Normalize effect to bring the peaks of both tracks down to -6dB (50%). Then the mix won't exceed 0dB (100%). Of course, you can reduce one track even more if that gives you a better sounding mix.

If you wish you can re-import the mix and Amplify or Normalize to tweak the final level. (If you save an intermediate file, export to WAV to minimize the generations of lossy compression.)