Kings of Leon new album - the first non-fungible token album ever out today.

[fas42]

Also out of curiosity 😉, I checked one of the tracks,, The Bandit - yep, the usual soft limiting; Audacity shows solid red, meaning clipping, throughout - applied my usual decompression method to restore the waveform, which gives nearly 8dB increase of dynamics, in this case. Playing the rescued alongside the original, huge improvement - the instruments which have all their dynamics squashed, come back to life; the toy sound quality they have in the 'proper' version is reversed.

 

If one bought one of these "modern" albums, the first thing one would do is recover a decent waveform, and play those from then on ... throw the starting point, mangled effort into the bin.

[fas42]

1 hour ago, One and a half said:

I thought that clipping once recorded cannot be restored, the recording is wrecked forever, like mp3. 
You’re not just using volume control in Audacity? There’s no such magic DR restoration in Sound Forge that works.

Always critical of your posts, this one I can’t let go.

 

It can be restored - won't be 100% perfect, but close enough that you won't pick it ... especially for rock/pop 🙂. The one I was most motivated to work on, many years ago, was a theme song for a local TV show; it was close to unlistenable, yes!, on a previous setup - but decompressing turned it back into a normal, rocky song - a vast improvement.

 

I used Audacity, but it has no magic button to do it either - a plug-in, and one has to play with the parameters to nail the right numbers - one's ears tell me if one is the right territory.

 

Here's the waveform that tells the story,

 

 

This is The Bandit, DL'ed from the Kings of Leon channel.

 

First version is the original, solidly hitting the bumpstops all the way through.

 

Second is the same, attentuated by 7dB

 

Third is the 2nd waveform, processed by the decompression plug-in - note how at the beginning of the song, that the soft intro hasn't been touched. Listening to them, the 2nd and 3rd, the volume sounds roughly the same - which the above certainly doesn't imply - but the last one is way superior in the quality of the backing sounds.

[fas42]

What I could do is post 30 sec snippets, from the start of the track, of all 3 - a good way to get the balance of the volumes right. Please note, I only spent about 5 minutes doing this, and the parameters almost certainly could be refined more, with more focus on the job.

 

Somewhat messy morning here, I'll get that done a bit later today, okay?

[fas42]

Ahh, what the heck ... 🙃

 

Not from the start, clipped off about 9 secs of intro twiddling ...

 

Original:

 

Kings Of Leon - The Bandit, part (orig).wav

 

As above, just adjusted gain, down by 7dB:

 

Kings Of Leon - The Bandit, part (att.7dB).wav

 

After mulching by decompression process:

 

Kings Of Leon - The Bandit, part (decomp).wav

 

Note that looking at the tracks, that it's clear that the waveform squashing is not undone properly, in places  - but the idea in the first instance is to improve the listenability. Let me know what you think, 😉.

 

 

36 minutes ago, MarkS said:

 

I wish record labels would do whatever you did to make some modern recordings listenable!

 

Yes, they would just "unmaster" - and call it a remaster ... I've have thought of trying to turn this exercise into something more; but nothing has motivated me enough, so far ...

[fas42]

Just now, sphinxsix said:

In general - I have always thought - if the parameters of compression were known, it should be possible to practically perfectly decompress a music file based on that.

 

A quick comparative listen on my IEMs - the  difference in the dynamics isn't that huge.

 

 

These days, every track in a mix has some processing - and then the final mix has some processing. In the first instance, you undo some of what was done in the final pass - trying to undo individual instruments is much harder; because you have to separate all the instruments first - this is still very hard ... but they're working on it, 😀.

 

The vocals are untouched in what I posted; it's all about the backing instruments - listen to the quality, and space around them; when the drums come in - to my ears, the original sounds like it's coming from an old transistor radio.

[fas42]

23 minutes ago, sphinxsix said:

In general - I have always thought - if the parameters of compression were known, it should be possible to practically perfectly decompress a music file based on that.

 

 

In practice this could be hard to guarantee - I did some exercises years ago where I took a simple waveform, compressed it using a sophisticated audio compression plug-in; and then tried to reverse it ... if the parameters didn't start to get fancy then it was possible to recover the original - but once you introduced options like lookahead, etc; it became less capable.

 

Which is not to say, that it couldn't be done - deep learning algorithms could be used to unpick what's happened, and make smart choices as to how to tackle the reversing ... I suspect there will be major work done down the track, where all the messed up recordings of the last couple of decades will be 'fixed' - whether the artists, and recording companies like it, or not.

[fas42]

37 minutes ago, Rexp said:

Wait what? You're always claiming (wrongly) that you can tweak the rig to make any recording sound good? 

 

If you master an album to deliberately make it unlistenable 😀, then it gets much, much harder to get to make the rig play it so that the experience is fully, umm, pleasurable ... you can make the system deliver the sound so that it's not distorting it significantly - but it's hard work to listen to ... give you an example: you go to a live gig; they have an excellent PA - but they wind up the dynamic compression on the mix, to near the max  - and you stand 10 feet in front of these speakers, as they play... how long are you gonna say, I'm lovin' this? 🤪 Umm, that's what listening to a Foo Fighter's album, say, is like ...

 

I'm interested in when they wanted to capture the music to be listened to; rather than it be a lifestyle exercise - that is, before 2000 or so ... if I really wanted to listen more closely to much of the recent stuff, I would need to fix it first - as described in the above posts...