#ian shepherd

[threestarsmash]

The [COMPRESSED] History of Mastering — Twenty Thousand Hertz

Join us on a musical journey from the Golden Age of analog mastering to the digital methods of today. We’ll find out why the music industry became obsessed with loudness, and learn how the digital era transformed the way that music sounds. Featuring Greg Milner and Ian Shepherd .

[deerinthegarden]

What’s happening ? In the last couple of weeks we’ve had new releases by Drake, Beyonce, James Blake and Radiohead – and the overall (integrated) loudness of all of them is lower than I’d normally expect. Here are the numbers: Radiohead -9.9 LUFS Drake -10.2 LUFS Beyonce -10.5 LUFS James Blake -14 LUFS (!) Wait, …

<3 Ian Shepherd. 

I've been stalking his website for a while now, and I needed something to post. So here, a link to his recent-ish (May, 2016) article about the loudness war, comparing (with pictures! ;-) =P) Radiohead, Drake, and James Blake.

Dynameter looks rad Mix well, friends =) -Jonathan (DitG)

[sperling]

CJ @ CinemaCon: Exhibition and Distribution – Collaborating and Partnering for the Greater Cause

At this year’s CinemaCon, if the keynote addresses given on International Day were noteworthy for reporting on the health and well being of the industry as a whole, then the panel discussion on collaboration between exhibition and distribution may have been the most informative session in terms of providing a day-to-day perspective of what it’s like to manufacture, market and sell new product in the space.

Titled “Exhibition and Distribution – Collaborating and Partnering for the Greater Cause”, the panel was moderated by Ian Shepherd, Chief Commercial Officer for one of Europe’s largest exhibition chains Odeon & UCI. 

Shepherd invited panel members hailing from leading exhibition chains and major studios onto the stage to participate in a discussion on the subject. These included, Paul Higginson, Executive Vice President of Twentieth Century Fox; Cameron Mitchell, CEO of Vox Cinemas; Bernardo Rugama, Commercial Vice President at Cinépolis; Amber Stepper, Vice President of Global Marketing at National Amusements; and Niels Swinkels, EVP of International Distribution, Universal Pictures International.

Read More at Celluloid Junkie

[crates-motel-blog]

Ian Shepherd doing his thing. That Dynameter is quite cool indeed, super useful! (People...Please...Stop using fucking spotify!)

[duelstudios-blog]

Normalisation - The end of the loudness war ?

Background Info:

Over the last two decades there has been a growing debate among audio engineers that music levels are becoming exceedingly loud. Sometimes to the point where it is creating a negative impact on the product.  

A working example of the increase in loudness and the decrease in dynamic range can be seen below.

The above picture is a waveform of a Bryan Adams track recorded in 1983. As you can see there is a large amount of headroom between the programme and 0 DBFS (decibels relative to full scale). The peak of this programme occurs at -2.5dB, meaning that this track can be increased by the listener by 2.5 db before any loss in audio quality can be perceived.

Fast forward to the year 2000 and here is a waveform from an album by the pop band Westlife. It is immediately obvious that this is significantly more compressed and louder than the song by Bryan Adams, and illustrates clearly the rise in audio levels from the 80′s up until the 20th century. Another item to consider is that the waveform above contains evidence of clipping when you zoom in on the peaks. With this in mind it seems as though there has been a trade off between audio quality in order to raise the volume of the track.

Why is it that music has risen to such a loud level?

During the 90′s there was competition between record labels and music producers in order to create the loudest sounding music. The reasoning behind this can be attributed to promotional purposes. If a song appeared on the radio that was louder than another, the chances are it would stand out to the listener and if the assumption is that ‘louder is better’ the other songs played on the radio would sound inferior to the louder track. Take a look at the graph below showing the gradual rise of loudness over the years.

The above video details a number of mastering and mix engineers views on the subject.

What’s being done to ease the trend of rising music levels? Bob Katz, author of ‘Mastering Audio: The art and the science’ recently stated on his website that ‘the loudness wars’, as it has been dubbed, is over. This is down to the new algorithm being implemented by iTunes Radio that effectively levels all of the music being played so that it plays back at the same volume. This ‘leveller’ is something called Soundcheck. And it has been around for a number of years in iTunes as a tick box that the user can enable. However, with iTunes Radio, the user has no option as the the algorithm is merged into the radio signal. This means that the listener can change between each radio station and various genre’s of music and the loudness level will appear constant. It also seems that youtube has implemented a similar normalisation technique as described by mastering engineer Ian Shepherd in an articles linked below. http://productionadvice.co.uk/youtube-loudness/

http://productionadvice.co.uk/youtube-loudness-normalisation-details/

Below is a video showing the effects of youtube loudness normalisation on an audio track.

So with arguably the two biggest players in terms of music distribution both using a similar method in order to control music loudness, it seems there may no longer be an advantage to compressing and limiting your music so that it reaches such a loud volume level.

[uesmag]

Ratovi Glasnoće - paranoja izazvana konkurencijom

Ratovi Glasnoće – paranoja izazvana konkurencijom

Proteklih par desetljeća, u glazbenoj industriji je došlo do zanimljivog trenda koji se izrodio iz psiholoških aspekata doživljavanja glazbe. Opće je poznata (ili na unutarnjoj razini doživljena) činjenica da ljudsko uho glasniju glazbu percipira kao bolju.

Iz tog razloga, pojedini su umjetnici već pedesetih godina prošloga stoljeća na svojoj glazbi zahtjevali glasniji mastering kako bi se…

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