mixtapers, get your butt over here!

Post Reply New Topic

Share your awesome method and secrets to create a soundtrack to your life, birthday mix, breakup mix, what have you.
actually people have so many iTunes mixes out there with random eras of specific genres full of songs its unbelievable. So if you have advice for that, at all, it just may be possible.

signing off for now...
R.W.

howya doin, rainbowwren75340
welcome to this thing of ours

i have been making mix-CDs [sorry, gave up using actual tape since the mid-90s] for well over a decade. mine are all over the map, from classical and jazz to showtunes and new age, even a little country-western/swing and novelty tunes [ala "dr. demento"] also. i like restoring old 78 rpm records [usually some kind of jazz or novelty] and putting them onto compilation CDs as well.
key points to a successful mix-CD are equalizing tonal balance and volume, from track to track. this is relatively tricky, because it is often system-dependent, and works well only on well-balanced sound systems with flat overall frequency response. you have to audition the mix on different systems [over headphones, on a boom box as well as a decent full-sized home stereo system] to get a good average sound. sometimes some amount of dynamic range compression is necessary, and/or morphing a frequency response curve from [some] tracks to some other tracks. still i am not always satisfied with the results. i wish i had the big record companies' secrets to doing this, all their professionally-produced mix-CDs sound very uniform.
another consideration when the destination is a data-compressed music carrier such as an MP3 player, is that any background noise in the sound files complicates compression, because the noise competes with the actual clean signal for available bits, so single-ended noise reduction on some older tracks is a must. failing to do this often results in noise-aliasing [that "star wars" flangey sound] because of not enough bits to code for both the noise and the music. the only way around this is to use a high bitrate [at least 320 kb/s] which can accomodate or capture more of the original signal.

Having a large music collection is a start.

Having, or having access to DAW software is also required, as is knowing how to use it. As far as level variance between tracks, you can always use the 'Normalise' feature that comes with the DAW to take care of that.

If you use Linux, Ardour is good and it's free, but in order to EQ, you'll have to get some LADSPA or Lv2 plugins, or pay the upcharge to get Harrison Console's Mixbus branded version of Ardour.

Although I have yet to try it, I'm intrigued buy the extra fuctionality that Harrison provides,(Harrison EQ, Routing, Compression, and Tape Emulation) to make it sound like a high end production console.