Imported Song WAV from Reason to FL Studio for Mastering

[SimonT]

Hi!

I've just imported a song into FL Studio 10, from Reason 7, to master. The stock mastering tools in FL Studio, sound far more professional than the MClass in Reason to me. Anyway, the wave itself is cut off at the tops and bottoms in quite a few places. One chunk is cut off for about 13 seconds. What is this indicating, clipping? It's obvious why the 13 second chunk is cut off, as it's where I doubled the vocals up and another synth melody comes in on the chorus, it gets quite loud there. How would any of you rectify this? I would imagine, you want the wave to be slightly under the edges top and bottom, right? When I look at the song file on Reason though, for that chorus part, the Spectrum EQ/analyser for the Master is peaking at about 25db at 60hz. There's 20hz, 80hz. 320hz etc, across the top of the analyzer, and the peak at 25db is in roughly 3/4's between the 20 and 80, so I'm guessing that's at about 60hz. On the actual level meter on the main fader itself though, on that chorus part again, the level is only just going out of the green and into the red. Not exactly sure what these levels all mean be honest (yet). On the fader itself, the red I'm talking about is just above the 0 on one side, and it says 12 on the other. Just noticed, the 0 is in blue, that is the VU, and the 12 is the peak. It's going just above that. I'll add a pic of the master fader in Reason for those who may not have it and the Spectrum EQ, and also the wav in FL Studio. The snipping tool in Windows is naff, would've liked to have added a pic of the master fader levels with the levels showing, and in the Spectrum EQ, but can't do a snippet screen shot with the file playing.







Also, when mastering, would people here always master in this order:- EQ, Compression, Maximizing then Stereo Imaging?

Thanks!

 

[Wallengard]

What you see in the waveform is what you think it is, clipping. What I would do to resolve that is to go back and lower all the track volumes together until you're not clipping anymore and/or look for wherever you are clipping in your plugins.. If you're only clipping on the master track you can simply lower it as well. Also I wouldn't analyse the waveform the way you're trying to do. Yes it will show you clipping if you were not previously aware of it but it certainly won't tell you what you should and shouldn't be doing in your mix.

Your images show nothing useful.
Press the print screen button and paste it in paint from the clipboard.

I'll just take a stab at it though. You could have an individual track clipping, without it actually clipping on the channel output. So essensen what that means is that you could boost volumes for the plugins like a mad man and lower the fader on the mixer until it's not clipping, but still have clipping.

The answer to the last question is no. I wouldn't always do that.