New Wave Outpost Forum

I'm making progress on getting set up to rip some vinyl (burned my very first CD-R ever this weekend!). I'm using Sound Studio (came with my new iMac) to record and it has nice level meters that show the peak for the entire recording. On my first recording I managed to get the levels set so the absolute peak was at -2dB, so I think that is about as good as I can do without clipping.

But when I play back from the CD-R the volume is much lower than store-bought CDs (except for a couple of very old ones). When I run the Normalize filter it doesn't get much better. Also, the waveform window shows 99% of the sound staying well within the inner (-6 to -6) band with maybe only 3 spots on the entire album side that peak outside that band, where eg my Garbage CD uses much more range throughout.

Should I run the amplify filter? Won't that cause clipping?

Or is this an eq. problem?

Thanks!

It's not the peaks that are responsible for the louder sound. Most modern CDs are mastered using dynamic compression. They typically get a RMS of -12dB (old CDs were as low as -20dB RMS). You really can't get that kind of levels without some kind of co