Are there any known ways to undo the compression? Assuming no clipping, the process should be reversible, right?

amiga386 16 hours ago | parent | next [-]

No, you need the original mix to remaster it yourself.

If you just amplify the whole track until its max amplitude reaches the medium's maximum, yes you could undo that.

But the loudness war aims to make the whole track even louder than that, by quietening those max peaks so they don't clip, then that gives you room to amplify the rest of the track even further. The dynamic range of the recording is permanently reduced.

▲

hurtigioll 2 hours ago | parent [-]

people said "it's impossible to separate tracks (voice, bass, ...) after they are mixed". true in theory, but neural-networks can separate them in practice

same here, but there is no real market for somebody to bother yet

	▲	svelle 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> but neural-networks can separate them in practice That's a massive stretch. They are able separate them sort of, but they are nowhere close the original quality of the individual tracks.

▲

WorldMaker 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"Assuming no clipping" is the biggest problem there, because the loudness wars resulted in a ton of very lossy clipping and similar artifacts. Arguably that sort of distortion became part of the expected sound, though, so just because it isn't reversible doesn't necessarily mean it is a problem.

In the open metadata world there is ReplayGain which analyzes music peaks and tries to create a negative gain to equalize the dynamic range to a standard volume at both the individual track and full album level.

Apple Music, Spotify, and others have proprietary but similar systems.

(As someone who deeply loves to shuffle an entire library, having a music player that supports ReplayGain has long been a personal requirement.)

▲

Melatonic 15 hours ago | parent [-]

ReplayGain sounds pretty cool. Does it pre analyse your library ?

	▲	nighthawk454 11 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		ReplayGain is nice - but note it doesn’t ’fix the compression’. Compression and dynamic range is about loud/quiet _within_ the track. ReplayGain just turns the volume up and down for the entire track, the point being so all your tracks play back at about the same level. It saves a preset on the volume knob for you essentially. If you remember making a playlist where one song is suddenly much louder than the last, and you’re riding the volume knob on every other song, you’ll see why this is nice!
	▲	WorldMaker 13 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yeah, you run an analyzer on your library and it creates MP3 or Ogg Tags that the player. Often you can leave the rest of the file as it was originally, just the new metadata tags. On Windows I've always liked Foobar 2000 for its strong ReplayGain support, both automating the analyzing pass and respecting the metadata in the tags once saved. On Unix I was using Banshee for playback and automating analyzing with a pair of CLI tools I've forgotten the names of, one was MP3 specific and the other Ogg/FLAC-specific, as I recall.

▲

nighthawk454 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Short answer, no not really. It won’t ever be as good as a proper uncompressed mastering

▲

macmccann 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

you can use an expander or something more advanced like Ozone 12's Unlimiter. you still lose signal when you compress even if you're not clipping so it won't be perfect