Subject: Songs sound very flat when exported from Garageband to Itunes

Can anybody help? When I record and mix down in Garageband the tracks sound great in Garageband (even through headphones) and sound good in Audacity, which I use for simple editing, but in Itunes and on my car stereo they sound very flat and dull, like they need the treble cranked way up. Should I just EQ the heck out of the master track? Is there a good sort of EQ wave someone can recommend? Also, any thoughts on making the songs more punchy, volume-wise? Sometimes even when the mixdown waves are just below peaking out, the songs don't sound gutsy on my car stereo.

Garageband does not do a good job of mastering. Try using T-Racks for mastering. You can download a demo. This will add compression/limiting/EQ capabilities and will add punch.

Good luck
Stratcat

It does sound like it could be that the mastering needs to be punched up, and you might be able to do a decent job mastering with Audacity. My friend on the MacIdol site, kilroydegeek, came up with this method, and to quote it from his original post: "Here's how it's done. (You'll need Audacity, free software available from http://audacity.sourceforg.org ) When you export your final GB mix to itunes (natively a 16 bit 44.1 AIFF audio document) drag a copy of this to your desktop, open in Quicktime, then export as a 44.1k 16 bit file (this is because Garage Band doesn't tag AIFFs properly)

Open the newly quicktime exported version in Audacity (Audacity will import at the file's native rate and depth.) Then change the stereo track sample rate (popup menu on the left of the track, next to the "X" button) to 96khz. The track will now play faster than twice speed. Select the entire track, then from the Effect menu, choose Change Speed... and enter a speed change of -54.0625% - Audacity will now resample the file to 96k at the right speed.

Once the resample is done, from the Effect menu, choose Normalise and make sure the Remove DC offset and Maximum Amplitude -3dB checkboxes are both set.

Next effect is High Pass Filter, which we set to 20Hz. This will block all frequencies below 20Hz but will pass everything above.

Now use the Low Pass Filter and set it to 20,000 (20khz) to roll off any frequencies that a CD or MP3 codec track will reflect back into the audible band (aliasing)

Now, using the FFT filter (which stands for Fast Fourier Transformation some fancy maths which extracts all the frequencies in a signal and works on them individually - yeh, it's an oversimplified explanation, but it'll do.) we're going to give a narrow, 3dB kick at 5kHz for sharper vocals and more overall presence. (This also makes a track very broadcast radio friendly) Click on the line at slightly left of 5k, at 5k and slightly to the right of 5k. Grab the little dot in the middle of the three you've just created and pull up to about 3dB.

Finally, from the File menu, export as a WAV (for use on your CD) and export as an MP3 (for use on MacIDOL) Then, opening your WAV in Quicktime, export it to a 16 bit, 44.1 AIFF for best compatibilty with iTunes."
It is a bit of a geeky method but since you already have Audacity, maybe you could try that.

Here is the technique that I use to "master" my songs. I work in GB with the multi band compressor across the master track. I use very little limiting here, just barely moving the volume indicators, more as protection than anything else. I keep the master levels below the red for sure to avoid distortion. I export the song to I tunes and then reimport the aiff file to GB in a new song file.

Then I use a plug-in called C3 Multiband compressor (its freeware but I don't remember where I downloaded it.

That plug-in will do what you want it to do. It has some pretty good presets and since it is a three band device you can do some tweaking on the overall freq response and it has a brick wall limiter that will allow you to squash the living s--t out of the track if that is what you choose to do. I have made some pre-sets that I like a lot for most of my pieces and I will apply them and then tweak to taste. Keep your levels below the peak in GB and you should add very little or no digital distortion.

The nice part about using GB for this step as opposed to using Audacity is that you can really listen to the results and tweak in real time. Audacity has to process the file and that makes on the fly tweaks impossible.

how are you monitoring your music? the aiff in itunes should sound really close to what you hear in GB4. also, what GB are you using? in GB4, you can choose to work on 24-bit, which gives you much better playback quality than 16 bit, found in other GB versions.
in GB, i never compressed the master, myself. i compressed and effected the individual tracks. drums always needed more compression than guitars, and vocals nedded a different type of compression than drums. eq-ing and compresion the whole master track can sometimes give you an uneven tone, and it could bite you during mastering.i tried to only add very subtle effecting in the master, and let the other tracks have thier fun. if it is flat, it needs eq. but if you cant hear it, you cant change it. i reccomend playing your song through many sources, cd player, car audio, home thater, and taking notes. then go back and mess with your tracks to get the sound you want
3.also, make cd's 5u8sing the aiff track, not an mp3. mp3's tend to sund tinny and nasty through car stereos, in my opinion.

Hi..Must say that whole 96k thing sounds a bit whacky to me,but onward..Don't forget you have a wealth of AU plugins that come with OSX..In GB they are after the GB FX and all have AU at the front..There is a multiband compressor that you may want to get to know as well as a much better reverb than in GB..Compressor,delay parametric EQ 3o some band graphic EQ and more.. Experiment with different ones over,or rather inserted on the master channel in GB..You should also (depending on the GB version) Be able to save directly to "disc" which you could make your desktop and not need to bounce to itunes at all. iTunes is the worst it gets IMO...J

Why do so many people seem to have a problem with itunes and bouncing to that program from GarageBand? When you do it is an aiff file at 44.1 16 bit. That is the best that GB3 will do. Itunes is simply a wrapper. It does nothing to the file as far as I can tell. Just a question?

Interesting suggestion regarding Audacity. I may try it and see if it makes a difference. I tend to shy away from doing anything too involved in the final stage. I like to tinker with my songs, and I will often hear things a couple days or weeks later that need to be addressed. Its nice to go in and make changes, then hit the "Export to iTunes" button.

With that said, I do use either the multiband compressor (GarageBand AU) or ChannelStrip (Metric Halo) on the master track to keep things sounding warm and to get reasonably good volume level. (I got both of these approaches from reading articles here at MJ)

As someone suggested earlier, make sure your final mix not in the red at all. Not a real issue going to .aiff but I have had a lot of problems with transients when converting to .mp3'. It seems that the playback level of the mp3 is greatly reduced if there are any transients that go into the red.

When you say "flat" do you me flat as in flat/sharp? I ask because I recently recorded some vocals over a wav soundbed composed by another musician. When I finished with compressing/mixing/futzing and exported the file from GB to AIFF, the vocals sound flat to me, when they sounded fine in GB. I would like to possibly try some of the techniques described in this thread, if that might help.

I don't think that's what the original poster meant, since he's referring to the songs not sounding gutsy and didn't mention anything about pitch. Unfortunately there are no mastering techniques that will correct pitch of a selective part of the mixdown. It could be you just didn't notice a pitch problem when mixing because of ear fatigue. Sometimes after a song is exported and you give your ears a little time to recover, things sound different just because your ears are a bit fresher. But that's just a guess. I just know that there are no mastering techniques for correcting sharpness or flatness of pitch of the vocal track of a mixed song. You should go back to the original song file before mixdown and correct pitch problems there, since that's the way to best approach this type of problem.