ANYONE WITH STUDIO EXPERIENCE HELP

[solarbird]

I have a serious, last-second problem.

iTunes’s Sound Enhancer, which is on by default, and everywhere, picks something in “Shout at the Desert” that on every other playback device I can find spends most of its time being an accent noise, and turns it into a continuous presence.

It does so mostly when cranked on headset, which is why I’ve never noticed it before. I have to play it at levels substantially louder than I like to listen to headsets, but levels that many other people consider just fine. Turn off Sound Enhancer, it goes away. Play the song on exactly the same hardware but outside of iTunes, it’s not there. You need iTunes+headset+loud, and then PLEASE ENJOY MY FESTIVAL GEYSER OF 659HZ KTHX.

This is where I hit my head against a wall a zillion times.

What the fuck do I do about this? I can’t ignore it, too many people use iTunes and it’s on by default, so I guess I have to engineer around it. But I want that noise in there! Just not, you know, RANDOMLY BOOSTED THROUGH THE CEILING.

Help?

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil.

Comments

[tfabris.livejournal.com]

From what I've gathered from googling, Sound Enhancer is a combination of stereo widener, eq, and multiband compression.

If you have a noise on a track that's severely increased by it, I'm guessing it's something stereo phase related. If your project hasn't gone to mastering yet, you might be able to work on this with your ME.

I should probably have a listen to how some of my tracks sound with it. :-)

[solarbird]

I've been doing a lot of digging. It appears that they're doing some sort of phase inversion and cross-channel mixing in combination. (I do of course do mono-playback checking, and haven't seen anything crazy, so it's not true phase-cancellation related. Also, the behaviour is additive, somehow.) Based on what behaviour I'm seeing here, it may be not true inversion but... some sort of phase rotation, if you can even apply that concept to sound?

Every bit of commentary I can find on it in regards to mixing says "turn it off." And that's good advice for mixing, but, well, I can't ask listeners do to that. I am relieved to discover that this doesn't seem to exist on iPods. Or more correctly, not on iPhones.

John's off on holiday this week, but I have thrown him "woah wtf do I do about this" email.

(Oh, nothing else is really hurt too badly by it. Just "Shout at the Desert." "Hide From Me" loses a bit in headphones, too, probably some others - but nothing stands out like "Shout." As far as I can tell, it's taking bits of two different studio elements and combing them... badly.)

[solarbird]

(Also, thanks for checking in to look at this - it's a real AGH WHAT NO moment for me.)