steve@baselines.com

Thanks Wookie - from my understanding it is not the galaxies themselves, but the space that is expanding. My belief is that it is due to the theory put forward in the Big Bang. Space is still expanding because of that. Some people state that it will keep expanding until all matter decays and turns into light energy. Then the expansion will slow down, possibly start contracting until we get back to the beginning again...and start all over! That's what I think will happen, but who really knows?

Here is the second song on my upcoming album, The Instrumentalist. It's called Bounce. My feeling is that the universe will eventually stop expanding and collapse upon itself, only to bounce back again in another Big Bang. Luckily, none of us will be around to see it happen. I also think this has happened before, but who really knows for sure? It's good to be alive. http://baselines.com/?p=5949

I always love it when a song forces me to research a topic. Sounding good, nice work here.

Thank you Bjorn - yes I agree - it looks like a lot of fun. I like the scene early on when the 4 dancers are doing their thing and a girl at one of the tables points her index finger in the air. Steve

An immersive experience. Enjoyed the listen.

This is so cool. Love it. This is a guitar style that really appeals to me.

Very interesting piece - I love what you did with the panning. And a great cello sound.

Nice job on this one Douglas. Love the guitar tone.

Nice song. Smooth and recorded well. Nice work on this one.

Thanks Lynn - coming from another great musician, your comment makes me feel great. Thank you!

Thanks for listening/watching. I never know what Youtube is going to do when I post. I needed to say it wasn't for kids in order to get comments enabled! Thanks for letting me know.

I hear that, around the Venus and Mars time maybe. Thank you for the compliment!

Thank you!

Here's a song I just recently remixed and mastered. I wrote it a while back and it will be the first song on my new album The Instrumentalist. Video here: If you don't want to watch the video, the blog post here: https://baselines.com/?p=5945

I haven't noticed the maximizer not being accurate, but I don't use that to determine the LUFS anyway. I use Insight 2 which gives me the accuracy I need. Incidentally, RX8 also has a nice utility to assess all of the volume levels of a whole track quickly.

Yes, I am talking about write automation to manipulate various Ozone functions. The Master Assistant will only listen to a portion of the song to make its decisions. They say to use the loudest part of the song to do this. But that kind of skews the softer parts. I could use track freezing, but my guess is that it would still be pushing the limits. I've gone to an alternate strategy of creating an intermediate wave file of the whole mixed track, bringing that single track into cakewalk and doing automation on that during a second pass.

The issue comes when you put metering tools like insight and tonal balance control in your chain to determine loudness. If you use the iZotope output fader, you are changing what you measure.

Thanks for listening - hope life is going well for you!

Bitflipper you are correct - the output fader doesn't play a part in my process. I've been using Ozone since 3.0 and I have to tell you, it has been a great ride (with all of iZotope's tools except maybe their earlier reverb offerings) - I love Nectar - it makes me almost sound like I know how to mix vocals properly. I also find Melodyne indispensable - but I promise to try diligently not to overuse it.

Thanks for the feedback Miguel!

Nice job Lynn - and good to see old Albert in the video as well!

Love this style - great work here.

Sounds great as always. Love the lush feel to this.

Yes, that is what I normally do at the very last stage. I master in the Ozone standalone. You only have to be careful about the output fader, because it is after the plugins in the chain. So if you have Insight as the last plugin, it is measuring pre output fader.

I thought I'd share - perhaps it is something you already do, but in case it's a new idea to you, it may be helpful. Up until recently, I would get the mix sounding balanced in Cakewalk and use iZotope Ozone, Tonal Balance 2 and Insight 2 on the master track to help me. I'd use the mastering assistant and then export without dither at 24bits to a wav file. Then I would load up the same plugins outside of cakewalk to master the track. The mastering assistant within iZotope will set the maximizer based on a small segment of the song. They say to take the loudest part and use that while the mastering assistant does its work. Recently, I tried to use the W feature in Cakewalk to allow me to change EQ and Maximizer level, but of course my machine is not quite powerful enough to do that. So now, I will get the Cakewalk track close using my old method stated above and export the wav file. Then I will start up a new Cakewalk file and load in the wav track only. I put the iZotope Ozone, Tonal Balance and Insight onto the master track and use the Cakewalk W to record actions related to the Ozone equalizer and Maximizer. I may have to do this on more than one pass if it gets complicated...each time saving off a wav and loading it into Cakewalk for more processing. When I get to a good point, I output the final wav file and then do a pass through Ozone standalone with Tonal Balance and Insight plugins. This allows me to get the proper volume levels throughout the song and adjust any frequency ranges that need it at individual parts of the song. You may have simpler methods, but this one seems to work really well for me. At the end of the last iZotope process, I have a master that I generally like.