98% of us are not audio engineers, and do not have access to the equipment that you do. Especially if I am paying up to $2.99 per track. I understand the loudness wars argument, and the issue with cheap earbuds (I use iBeats w/ comply foam at the gym, and Pioneer HDJ-2000 when I am on the decks), but that shouldn't be used as a reason to produce tracks that are distorted and clipping all over the place. Let's put the politics aside, most EDM is sampled from other original works anyway, so the 'original' feel of a track was lost as soon as it was sampled.

I like PN, because of the warmth it adds to the tracks I play. Having played with it in Ableton, I understand why the MIK crew licensed the plugin for PN. While I agree with most of what you said, there are a few Ableton certified trainers that turned me on to Izotope Ozone (for Ableton), even though I have used PN for a few years now. Unless it's a really crappy version to begin with, don't let PN touch your tracks for the sake of the artists and all those engineers that mixed that record a certain way because that's how it's supposed to sound. Platinum Notes = Will never touch my files.Īs long as you use good versions of your tracks (all of mine are ripped into Apple Lossless, or are downloaded as 320 MP3s if I can't get a lossless format) then use Auto Gain in Traktor, watch your meters when loading a track and use the gain on the mixer to match, but please. You can google 'Loudness war' and get tons upon tons of more information on this as well. Here's a great example and a few sites where you can read about the Loudness War. Gain is the only thing that I will ever use to match track volumes.

It has the potential to kill the dynamics of a track, something that can not be fixed. This is why I will never allow a program to do this to my tracks. I understand the problem of tracks not being the same volume as each other, but are you going to have the possibility of hurting a track just to make it sound as loud as the next? Dynamics give life to a track by giving it highs and lows. Basically, 'loud sounds better' to the common person today and most people are wearing shitty Apple earbuds that have to compete with all the surrounding mass of sound, so people are mixing as loud as possible. Here's the problem, an algorithm can't actually hear anything.īasically, I see Platinum Notes helping lend in to something going on that we like to call in the audio engineering world as 'The Loudness Wars'. What you are doing with a program like Platinum notes is taking out those dynamics with compressors and several other things that some algorithm decided upon. If you remove these you are seriously effecting the intended sound of a track. Not to mention as long as you've got good rips of the tracks they area already mastered with proper dynamics and such that the song is intended to have. I also do not believe in anything that is basically 'auto-mastering' a song, and quickly frankly, as I said before, just the concept scares me. I've been an audio engineer for many years, and I have not heard of a single legit engineer using Izotope Ozone for mastering.

While Platinum Notes is using a legit mastering suite to perform it's function, it's using the cheapest mastering suite you can buy.

There's the recording engineer, mixing engineer, and then the mastering engineer, that all did their tweaks to make that track sound the way it does, the way the artist wanted it to. While not as much in EDM, with most music, tracks have several engineers tweaking the sound a certain way because that's how the artist wants it to sound. I take very much pride in the fact that I have the highest quality rips from all of my CDs and vinyls. If it was a simple volume matching, it wouldn't be that bad, but there's so much more that it has the potential to ruin for me. That being said, I have a completely different opinion on Platinum Notes.Īs an audio engineer, I'm actually afraid of what Platinum Notes would do to my tracks. I recommend it, or at least another 'keying' program for every DJ. Ok, first, let me say this first, I LOVE MiK and every track I have has been run through it.

Mp3 gain edm