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I'm "re-mastering" an album, but unfortunately the original master tapes just burned in a warehouse fire, so all i have to work with is the already mastered CD audio. So i guess what I'm doing is less of a proper mastering job and more of a "can i improve the way this sounds at all" job.

Here's the kicker: the album was horribly mastered originally and, as a result, the whole mix is audibly clipping at about -2.5 db.

As far as i know, there's nothing i can do to un-distort the mix, but i thought i'd see if anyone has been in a similar situation before and has any advice.

thanks!

how often is it clipping? if it's less than say 200 times in the total program, i would just go in and manually edit the sample values where it's clipping, to take the square off of it and at least put a little up/down wavering in there. i've done that before with cooledit and soundforge. taking the squared-off section and just slightly adjusting the sample values so it isn't square will take out the audibility of the clipping. it might not sound amazing or anything, but it'll sound a lot better than how it does now.

this can be a very ugly, very time-consuming process.

i think there are plug-ins that will remove pops/clicks that might work in this case. it's hard to say without hearing it and seeing the waveform on a screen. i can't even tell you how many hours i spent going through this process manually for a live recording i did back before i got a good USB sound card for my laptop. it was brutal!

good luck!

thanks for the reply.

unfortunately, this recording is totally cooked i think. i should post a picture of the waveform so you can see how sad it is.
Physically altering the waveform to be less square is a cool idea though! I've always wanted to make a piece in protools solely with the pencil tool--just drawing in waves, but such a thing is a little impractical for obvious reasons.

in that case just add a slight and warm distorsion !

hey colin!

is it digital clipping?

can you eq to curb the most obnoxious frequencies?

if it's digital, would giving it some kind of mild analog distortion (say, with your tube preamp or something) blend away some of the horror, or would it just crap it up further?

olivier wrote:in that case just add a slight and warm distorsion !

trilonaut wrote:is it digital clipping?

can you eq to curb the most obnoxious frequencies?

if it's digital, would giving it some kind of mild analog distortion (say, with your tube preamp or something) blend away some of the horror, or would it just crap it up further?

i would expect GIGO in a case like this. sounds like it's excessively clipped, and especially if it's digitally clipped, i wouldn't expect tweaking to fix it enough. it would likely still have an inescapable crap element, even if you minimize it, it probably won't go away.

somebody should create a wikipedia entry for "can't polish shit".

yes but now it's intentional crap ! sometime it's better to intesify instead of hide . listen to some ruins album ..

but yes garbage in garbage out ..

are you sure the original mastering engineer doesn't have the project backed up to disk/dvd/something? reputable MEs usually do that, though i don't know how 'reputable' your original ME was..

Well... he mentioned that the original masters were tapes...

When a client brings their mixes to me for mastering, I generally master as the music is being loaded into the computer, regardless of mix format (analog, digital, wire, etc.). Those mastered files are then sequenced together to form the running album, and parts (these days usually CDs) are cut. Since the audio in the computer is kept at 24bit (sometimes higher) resolution, the audio is dithered when the CD is burned, to 16bit.

When the session has finished, I archive the files in my computer (which are the mastered versions) to DVD-R as data.

I hand the original mix masters back to the client.. what they do with them is their business, although I do preach proper storage technique (no large magnetic fields, no heat, don't piss on them, don't let you pets piss on them, etc.).

I have archives of pretty much every project I have ever mastered, going back over 10 years - some on digital formats that are nearing extinction (Sonic NuBus SSP-3 Exabyte anyone?)... if a client were desperate for an archive of a *mastered* project that I did.. I'd probably have it.

But the mixes aren't my (or any mastering engineer's) responsibility...

best,
trev

thanks for all the suggestions!

here's what i ended up doing if anyone is interested. I used the waves "x-crackle" plugin to reduce the grating high-frequency distortion. The plugin did roll a little high end off the track, but i'm fine with that since the mix was too bright to begin with. next i ran the mix out into analog and through a tube mic preamp (thanks for the suggestion, george!) set to peak just before clipping. This warmed up the mix ever so slightly. I then redigitzed and then set a multiband compressor to only affect around 120-250 Hz in order to reduce some of the farty low-end humming caused by the original mix's distortion.
The product I came up with doesn't totally fix the problem, but it definitely sounds better. It also seems to have added a touch of dynamics back into a totally squashed program, and when i zoom in on the peaks that were once heavily clipped, the waves are rounded-off instead of trapizoidal. I attribute this mostly to the x-crackle.

c