Ok, I'm not an educated, experienced Audio Engineer and I'm probably not explaining this right. When I said Limiting earlier, I'm referring to automatic limiting the software is doing. Think about it, you recorded 4, 6 or whatever tracks at the absolute max level you could get away with without clipping any individual track. How would you mix those tracks down and not wind up with a distorted clipped mess? Just lowering the sliders in RB's mixer isn't good enough. I can't explain it exactly but just that alone won't do it. When you select "Merge to Stereo Wave" RB is doing some automatic limiting to avoid clipping. The best way and the pro way is to not record your individual tracks so hot. They have to be recorded down at -12 or so. It's all about leaving some headroom throughout the whole recording process from tracking individual parts, to the mixdown to the final master. Here's a pretty good article about it:

http://karma-lab.wikidot.com/misc:setting-gain-levels-for-recording-and-mixing

Note what he says here

The executive summary

If you want to avoid reading a lot of details, the short story is this:
•Record at 24-bits. 16-bits is antiquated now and doesn't give you enough dynamic range and headroom to work with.
•The analog input signal from the M3 into your audio interface should be loud enough to start causing red flashes on the peaks (in your audio interface's input meters), and then you should drop the volume just enough to make the red flashes disappear.
•The digital signal from your audio interface into your sequencer's individual recording tracks should be set at -12 to -18dB on the input meters for each track being recorded. Don't go near -6dB and certainly don't get anywhere near 0dB when tracking.
•The digital signal in your sequencer's Master meter should peak at -6dB when creating your mixdown. If you go over -6dB peak on the Master, lower the volume of all your tracks slightly, and equally, to reduce the summed volume of all tracks as needed to keep the Master peaking at -6dB
•Render your mixdown to a WAV or AIFF file still at -6dB because normalization and limiting from within all major sequencers is pretty weak.

I take this to mean if we're trying to do this the correct "pro" way we don't want RB or any other sequencing software to handle any of this automatically for us. This is why I use Audition, I have complete control over the mix down. RB may allow for that too, I just never use it for that.

Again, this is the proper educated way to do this. I suspect most people on this forum including me think RB's automating rendering down to wav sounds good enough and that's the end of it. Eddie has talked about wanting to know how this is all really supposed to work and is talking about going to school about it.

From the quote above:

The digital signal from your audio interface into your sequencer's individual recording tracks should be set at -12 to -18dB on the input meters for each track being recorded. Don't go near -6dB and certainly don't get anywhere near 0dB when tracking.

Here's where my comparison to Gain Change comes in. I've seen the result of generating a RD track in RB. The wave form is so small you can hardly see it until you blow up the track. I'll bet it's down around -15db or so and that's exactly what this guy is talking about. To put it back to Eddie's question, if the RD track is that low, it's because RB did it that way on purpose so no, you shouldn't apply Gain Change to raise the RD track up, you should be lowering all the rest of the tracks down. Iow, those other tracks were recorded/rendered, whatever too hot, not that the newly generated RD track is too low. RB is doing it right.

Hope this makes some sense. If it doesn't then just hit the render button and be done with it.

Bob

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