Charles and Eddie - "Would I Lie To You"

I have the radio edit on a couple of TM GoldDiscs...come to think of it, the song sounds a bit clipped there as well. Anyone have a promo single to reference?

Ed:

It's when, at some points during the song, the audio become distorted

I should have been more clear with the term "clipping"...

For this particular song, it appears that at some point in the chain, someone sent the peak levels over 100%, so that the tops and bottoms of the waveform got shaved off. If you zoom in, you can see a hard cutoff for the waveform - it usually shows up on the drum hits first.

If you take this to its logical extreme, as is the case with most modern-day rock and pop song masterings, the audiophiles refer to this as "maximization" or "brick-walling". When you zoom out, the waveform just looks like one solid brick wall - no loud parts and soft parts, just LOUD start to finish. This is how virtually everything that hits the charts is mastered nowadays, and it really sounds horrendous.

"Would I Lie To You" is not brick-walled by any means, and the clipping that shows up in the single edits cited above aren't all that severe. Most wouldn't even notice it; I only noticed it because I had seven different versions of the song all open at the same time on my screen and I could clearly see the waveforms. The bass drum sound that Eric refers to is indeed deliberate, and isn't a result of the clipping.

As a sweeping generality, I've found that it's best if the waveforms peak all over the place during the song, and aren't hard-stopped at 0 dB (100%), -1 dB, -3 dB, or at any one particular level. Your results may vary.

crapfromthepast wrote: If you take this to its logical extreme, as is the case with most modern-day rock and pop song masterings, the audiophiles refer to this as "maximization" or "brick-walling". When you zoom out, the waveform just looks like one solid brick wall - no loud parts and soft parts, just LOUD start to finish. This is how virtually everything that hits the charts is mastered nowadays, and it really sounds horrendous.

An extreme example of this, if you follow contemporary music is Katy Perry's hit from a few months ago "I Kissed A Girl". This is compressed & hard-limited to the point where it's almost unlistenable. I haven't tried the program John suggested, but I did try some expansion with Adobe Audition and all it did was make the song "pump". I'm sure all this over-processing is to make Ipods sound "just like the radio", but no station I've ever set up processing on ever sounded this bad (though there are a few that I've come into where they were pretty close :-/)

One more thing: I noticed Amazon lists a US CD single with the "Radio Edit" as the lead track. Was the full album version on the cassette single, and is that why there is not a designator in the database? Certainly, the "Radio Edit" was the hit version.