ISOL8 a must have for mastering it's FREE

[John Vere]

Someone mentioned this I think in the freeware thread but I'm kind of stoked about what I found I could do with it. I just finished making 40 videos that are my backing tracks for upcoming gigs. I try and make the Cakewalk exports very close to the same by using the same Bass and drums etc. But, when dealing with this many songs it's easy to miss a setting and as a result some songs are NOT the same. Like the bass being too quiet. I always drop them into the You lean loudness meter but that isn't telling you the whole story. You can also use a spectograph like Span but still it's peaks and not actual loudness. ( LUFS ) 

In my screen shot you can see that I dragged all the videos into a blank project. Note that they could be your finished Masters but in my case they are videos. Bet you didn't know Cakewalk did that. There is just the audio which is all I wanted. 

So in this case I'm using the dpMeter5 and the ISOL8 which are both free.  

Here is my overall LUFS which is very near my target of 13.5 LUFS.  The ISOL8 is off. 

Now I engage the LF solo LUFS reading of 15.7 which I determind was the average reading which seemed to be 16LUFS for the low end. Most of the songs were correct and close to this target.  But then there were songs that were 12LUFS and 20 LUFS. I made notes. 

Next I engage the LMF solo and this seemed to average around 24 LUFS for most songs 

Then the MF Solo and that seemed to average around 30 LUFS for most songs. But then a few were like 22 LUFS so once again I make notes. 

I also did the HMF but it was never worth worrying about but I would have if this was an important song. 

In the end I had about 12 songs that were not up to snuff and thanks to this test I now new why. I just opened the original projects in Cakewalk and almost immediately I would find out what went wrong. Like a hi pass filter on the bass that didn't belong. Before I re exported I used the same 2 tools on the Master bus and then using the LP multi band and a bit of re mixing of keyboards I managed to get all 40 of my tracks almost perfectly the same as far as frequency balance and loudness go. 

I'm just about to release about 35 of my originals and I'm stoked about applying this little trick to those as well. 

Another thing the ISOL8 revealed was distortion in the low end sometimes. I have limiters to control peaking but this is another rabbit hole I will need to re visit for my originals.