Enhancing digital piano sound

[Trebor]

... applied the "Normalize" effect.

You say Normalize but you don't say to what setting.

There's only a slight bit of distortion now

Sorry IMO there are far more instances of distortion on this remix than in the original, the level of the piano is too high.


I’m not sure if this is relevant but I’m using Audacity 1.3.11 (on windows) and I’ve noticed that previews of effects are not accurate if the sample rate is not 44100, e.g. the preview of equalization on a 22050Hz track sounds completely different to when the equalization is applied, (the applied effect is about an octave deeper than it sounds on the preview)*.

Your mp3s are 48000, maybe you could try 44100.

If there is an Audacity bug relating to tracks with sample rates other than 44100 this could explain why your track sounds OK but when saved the equalization and levels change, (becoming distorted and trebly).


[ * maybe I should send in a bug report. ]

[Jim Robbins]

That's a lot better isn't it. As you say, there is still a bit of distortion, for example at 15 to 16 seconds. The level of the mix at this point is sufficiently below 0dB so I suspect that the piano track was recorded a little too loud and was distorted before you got to the stage of mixing.

Converting to MP3 should ideally be left to the very last step of the production process. The MP3 format is what is called a "lossy compression" format - that means that the file size is reduced not only by "squashing" up the data, but by throwing away some of the data - as a consequence there is always a little bit of sound quality loss when you encode as MP3. Opening and MP3, editing it and exporting again as an MP3 increases the quality loss a little more - the quality loss is cumulative. Better is to keep in an uncompressed format (such as WAV) until the final export.

Great advice, Steve. I really appreciate it. I'll try keeping it in WAV until I export to MP3.