PT 12.5.2 Offline Bounce - Different Levels after Bounce ??

[innenhofstudios]

Hi Guys,

I just made an offline bounce with wav and mp3 at the same time.
mp3 is about 3 dB lower than the wav ???

Then i first did the WAV Bounce and then once more the MP3 Bounce.
Always offline. Also a difference in Level.

Anyone else too? Any Ideas ?

Best René

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PT HD 12.5.2, OS 10.9.5, 16Gb 2,4DDR3, 4Ghz ICore i7

[YYR123]

No I never noticed, but then I only bounce Wav's.

[kava]

wow, thats tough.

I experience the same difference, just tried different mp3 encoder settings, makes no difference.

interesting point: theres no difference when I bounce straight waveforms like sinewaves. but I get 3db difference when I bounce pink noise for example. this 3dB peak difference make 0.2dB RMS difference and 0.2LUfs.

so here mp3s are actually louder than the wavs. the sine wave didn't distort, but full range pink noise clips after the reimport of the .mp3.

also checked levels with other software, the PT import is not the problem...

strange and dangerous,

btw. greets from cosmix :)

tom

[Rich Breen]

Originally Posted by innenhofstudios

...
mp3 is about 3 dB lower than the wav ???...

How are you measuring these differences? Peak meters? LUFS Momentary? LUFS Long Term? Do they *sound* like roughly the same level? If they don't then there may be something wrong with your encode workflow, but an mp3 will not *measure* the same as a WAV file (in particular peak/short term measurements will be wildly different in unpredictable ways) - you are after all throwing out considerable amounts of data.

Originally Posted by kava

...full range pink noise clips after the reimport of the .mp3...

This is to be expected - one of the many reasons to leave headroom for an encode or decode pass. Lossy codecs (like mp3 / AAC) do not do well with full-level or heavily limited program.