Can someone talk about the "Mastering" section?

The Effects special seciton is great!!!!!

Convolution / Guitarsiute / distortion / Mastering

Anyone with experience care to throw a few pointers on the wall re: mastering?

I am actually seriously inexperienced with mastering, but i have a mixed piece that needed it. So i mixed it down and opened it in the "Mastering and Analysis" view. I opened the "Mastering Rack" and added the "Mastering" element under the "Special" menu. While listening just with some of the presets, i was pretty satisfied with how well it helped out the sound, as well as how easy it was to use and understand.

But now something weird is happening. I hit "OK" after applying the "Mastering" and a "Multi-Band Compressor" to the song, and AA3 is not responding. Not that it's hanging and actually says "Not responding", but that it wouldn't let me select anything nor did it appear to apply my changes yet. I popped into the Task Manager to see what the program was doing and it appears to simply be chewing up a considerable amount of RAM on my machine. I have 4GB of it with a dual core athlon 64 processor.

But for now, i will just let it go until it works, or until it crashes! I'll report back on what the final outcome is.

Yay for my first post! 

Well, it went up to about 2GB of RAM being used and i had to kill audition. Definitely shouldn't take this many hours to process the file! Maybe I don't like the new mastering features! I imagine they could be memory/cpu intensive, but this is totally ridiculous. Anyone else having this happen?

Well, it went up to about 2GB of RAM being used and i had to kill audition. Definitely shouldn't take this many hours to process the file! Maybe I don't like the new mastering features! I imagine they could be memory/cpu intensive, but this is totally ridiculous. Anyone else having this happen?

Is this a repeatable behavior?  Or is this a one time occurance?

It happens every time. I tried it again doing one effect at a time, but it did the same thing. I would expect some kind of progress bar, but nothing happens. Just starts eating memory, then i stop it once im finally fed up. Similar things work in AA2.0, however. I wonder what that is all about? I failed to mention that it IS the demo version of AA3.0, could that have something to do with it?

It happens every time. I tried it again doing one effect at a time, but it did the same thing. I would expect some kind of progress bar, but nothing happens. Just starts eating memory, then i stop it once im finally fed up. Similar things work in AA2.0, however. I wonder what that is all about? I failed to mention that it IS the demo version of AA3.0, could that have something to do with it?

What you report is definitely not a "normal" behavior.  I can't duplicate this at all with 3.0, and I am using a pc with much lower specs.  What os are you running?  I've tested on both WinXP and Vista.  This shouldn't be normal behavior for the demo, since the demo is fully-functional.  As far as I know this is the first mention of this problem.  Do you have access to another pc to trial the demo?  I would recommend removing an uninstall/reinstall...but that would end the trial period.   

yeah i can try it on this PC sometime today and see if it does the same stuff. Just have to transfer a file or two over from the music machine. Both machines i have run xp pro but this one has much less in the way of specs as well. I'll see if it does the same here.
Thanks!

What you report is definitely not a "normal" behavior.  I can't duplicate this at all with 3.0, and I am using a pc with much lower specs.  What os are you running?  I've tested on both WinXP and Vista.  This shouldn't be normal behavior for the demo, since the demo is fully-functional.  As far as I know this is the first mention of this problem.  Do you have access to another pc to trial the demo?  I would recommend removing an uninstall/reinstall...but that would end the trial period.   

Wow, it does happen on this PC as well. That's pretty strange. This PC is much slower as well, but it isn't like the machine freezes when i run a multi-band compressor on the wave form, AA3 just wont respond, like it's in the middle of something. No progress bar comes up. I've rebooted both machines a few times and that hasn't helped. Kinda weird if the thing doesn't work properly on 2 separate computers.

Just out of curiosity, since these are tools I wouldn't normally use, I tried the 'Mastering' and 'Multiband EQ' in a rack on a track.  The track is 3'44", the processing took 48".  This is a 3 GHz, P4 with 1 GB of RAM.

You seem to have a weird problem.

Incidentally, it totally destroyed the musicality of the track - why do people use this stuff?

I imagine you have to be pretty careful with those tools so as not to destroy the original intent of the music. Mastering for me is really just a way to bring some final levels up so that each track doesn't have a significant volume change. Keeps me from blowing out people's speakers when a loud song comes on.

This is not the forum for this, but i wouldn't mind posting the wav or mp3 of it if someone was willing to try it with the same track im working on... The track is just over 5 minutes long, not sure if somehow it was just too long or it simply was too good of a track for AA3 to process! just kidding. If you dont mind, let me know and i will post the track for you or whomever.

I imagine you have to be pretty careful with those tools so as not to destroy the original intent of the music.

You certainly do.  Personally, I belong to the school that says 'mastering' is an unnecessary step if the mix has been done properly - but I appreciate others differ.

Mastering for me is really just a way to bring some final levels up so that each track doesn't have a significant volume change. Keeps me from blowing out people's speakers when a loud song comes on.

In which case, I would suggest you are using entirely the wrong tool for this purpose.  Check out the in-built 'Group Waveform Normalize' as an alternative way of achieving a constant perceived volume level acroos a number of different tracks.  Alternatively, there are third-party softwares designed to do much the same thing.

'mastering' is an unnecessary step if the mix has been done properly

Makes sense. When I mix I often have an idea where final levels will be. I aim each song for that level. With a specific section marked "Mastering," I wanted to know what the creators of this program had in mind: press a button and find the pot of gold? 

Creating song tracks, I usually compress / parametrically EQ each track to see how they sound in the mix together. Then make a 2 trk mix. Polish with Graphic EQ / FFT filtering, and add gentle hardlimiting at the end. I did a test and there's a definite difference in sound when compression comes before parametric EQ. The resulting track become alive and vibrant. To me this is mastering done on the level of the individual track: removing harsh negative frequiencise that destroy sound. Mpore formal mastering would be: Ensuring intros / outros fade up / down properly and levels of songs match. Of course in a CD, the order of songs is everything - but that's more a band's / producer's decision. The engineer through mastering, makes it possible to easily rearrange songs at will.

Downloadable songs let your mastering create maximum impact with the unknown - you never know what the next song will sound like before / after your song is played. How do you master for that? Back to getting individual tracks right from the start.

Tools that exist in AA 3.0 can be used to hone in and change sound such as: 1. Effects / Stereo imagery; 2. View / Phase display 3. View Frequency Display 4. View Pan Display; Window / Frequency Analysis / Phase Analysis / Amplitude Statistics; View - Top / Tail Views; Frequency Band Splitter (Multitrack). Should I use these more?

When mastering requires removal or boosting of certain frequiencies, AA 3.0 seems able to do the job. Removing negative frequencies in individual tracks, creating song mixes from scratch, I never really need to play with specific frequency bands. Am I missing something? A new stone to turn over? However, should a band come to me and ask me to to move heaven and earth to change this or that in a final mix - the tools are here to move forward.

I haven't really used any mastering tools in production yet. Mostly, i wanted to try them out in order to be a part of this thread. I suppose i wouldn't need to use them all that much. Typically, recordings i have done get sent somewhere else to be 'mastered'. I still can't seem to find an explanation for why audition screwed up just because i used these tools. Nor am i sure that it is limited to those effects....

I guess i'll just keep trying things and let you guys know what didn't work..... Multi-tracking and VST stuff with all of the standard tracking goodies are what i use most. Those seem to work ok except that installing new VST plugins still crashes AA3.0 just like in 2.0 but then I re-open audition, and the VST plugins are actually installed. Just crashes them on the refresh i guess.

I wonder if anyone else has the same issue with the mastering tools? or any others?