June 5th, 2008 by niwa | posted in info, niwa's audio corner |

First off something totally unrelated. I got some requests to put my own music online, aside from the sidebar last.fm player. I found a nifty little 1-button flash player, and put all the ‘niwa’ songs up for play on my site. Enjoy!

So you’re doing a mix-down of a track in your favorite audio software and you got everything set up nicely, when you notice that somehow you don’t get the desired volume. You check every setting and effect and it’s all like it should be, but the volume is still too low. Then you’ll probably apply some gain to get the desired loudness, which works but pushes the meters totally in the red while the track doesn’t sound loud at all.

There are a number of reasons that could lead to this situation, and one of them is easy to fix but also easy to forget: the DC offset.

Wikipedia has a clear an decent explanation of what DC offset is, so I’ll point you towards that. As explained in the article you can get rid of it by using a one-pole high-pass filter, but you probably can’t be bothered (like me) to set up yet another filter. In comes Sony Sound Forge with an easy solution.

From the pull-down menu, choose ‘Process’ -> ‘DC offset’. Advanced users can set their own parameters there, but the ‘automatically detect and remove’ option works fine too.