How to fix a messed up mastering of a song?

[RejZoR]

The track in question is this one (can't post a full track for legal reasons):
https://www.beatport.com/track/when-our-story-has-to-end-radio-edit/9670467

The thing is, before I bought it, it sounded quite ok on PC. I love the vocals, but when I sticked this on my USB drive in a car, it's so boomy it's ridiculous. I had to turn off all bass boosting features and turn EQ for bass all the way to zero.

I was playing a bit with Bass and Treble in Audacity and I've come to a problem where I've toned down bass for 16dB and bumped treble for 6dB which made it somewhat bearable, but I've noticed it started taking away the depth from the vocals as well. Admittedly, I never worked with any of more advanced features in Audacity, like Compressor and stuff, just basic cutting, fade in fade out etc. Could it be done with this tool? I need to cut down that stupid bass without ruining vocals. I know it's hard task now that track is a single block of data, but still...

 

[consoled]

That sound quality is very bad. It was not recorded well. The sound is not clear. Bass is very weak

 

[FordGT90Concept]

It sounds fine to me. I think your car needs tuning. I spent months tuning the subwoofer volume on my stereo system. I would listen to one song, think it doesn't have enough bass, then listen to another, and think it has too much. I just kept tweaking and tweaking until I hit that sweet spot where everything sounds good.

You say it sounds good on PC...that means the sound file itself is fine. Focus on the car.

 

[RejZoR]

No. All other songs sound fine in the car ranging from acoustically played songs to trance, just this one goes totally bonkers on bass. Now I've dropped it through several filters, even found EQ filter that has presets to lower the bass, tried limiters and stuff, maybe one of them will sound ok.

 

[silentbogo]

Sounds fine in my headphones, but it may be different in a car with a hefty subwoofer.
Instead of "bass and treble" try playing with equalizer in Audacity. You can do some precise tweaking with minimal impact on vocals.

 

[Vayra86]

The problem with this track, to me, is that it has too much of a stereo image. If you can tighten that down more 'towards the middle' the whole thing won't sound like an overcompressed piece of junk.

I will say this: the bass isn't too heavy or out of balance. Its just poor mastering, seems like a cheap preset.

Car stereo however is the worst baseline to go on. If you adapt it for car stereo, it'll probably sound like absolute horror outside of it.

The least you can do to get best of worlds in any case is cut everything out below 30 hz if it isn't already, and maybe even go a tad higher, to 45 hz for your 'car version'. It will remove a lot of boominess and the result is clearer bass. (A pass filter can do this)

 

[qubit]

The dynamics on that track have been compressed down to nothing and the sound quality overall is quite poor in that clip. Presumably the file you bought sounds better?

I've got a bassy sound system at home and this doesn't sound any different to many other tracks of this type for bass. It's recorded for powerful, thumping bass that your neighbours across the road will hear - great for the nightclub. The frequency of that bass note is quite low and powerful to achieve this. Just turn down the amplitude of the bass a bit in Audacity and put a bass rolloff in if you can and call it a day. Short of replacing that bass note with something else, there's not much you can do with it.

Finally, I like electronica myself and especially trance and have bought quite a bit of music from this site. Trouble is, they're ridiculously expensive for full CD quality sound with their so-called "WAV handling" fee which puts me off from buying much from them nowadays. I won't touch MP3, no matter if it's full rate or not. WAV/lossless or nothing for me.

 

[Vayra86]

Beatport always seems to do something with their digital content. I've bought quite a few tracks there and almost none of them sound 'as they should be'. I have vinyl versions of some of these tunes and they are very different. Its subtle but its definitely there...

This might be a solid alternative;

https://boomkat.com/

 

[qubit]

Beatport always seems to do something with their digital content. I've bought quite a few tracks there and almost none of them sound 'as they should be'. I have vinyl versions of some of these tunes and they are very different. Its subtle but its definitely there...

This might be a solid alternative;

https://boomkat.com/

I'm surprised that Beatport would interfere with the recording in any way as all they have to do is to put it up for sale, but I'm not saying you're wrong, I just don't have anything to compare the recordings to. This kind of dance music does use a lot of compression and special effects to get its sound though. I do like the dynamics pumping on a lot of tracks, in particular. So unnatural and... wow.

Also, don't forget that vinyl will sound different to a CD, because the signal must be modified to get a good groove cut, in particular lowering the amplitude of strong bass like in this track that could cause excessive stylus swings and reduce the playing time. There tend to be lots of other eq that's applied on there, too. In short, the sound is much closer to the original on the CD than the vinyl, whatever vinyl fans may say. All this adds up to a different sound on vinyl than CD, or the original digital file created by the artist.

Boomkat looks good.

 

[Vayra86]

I'm surprised that Beatport would interfere with the recording in any way as all they have to do is to put it up for sale, but I'm not saying you're wrong, I just don't have anything to compare the recordings to. This kind of dance music does use a lot of compression and special effects to get its sound though. I do like the dynamics pumping on a lot of tracks, in particular. So unnatural and... wow.

Also, don't forget that vinyl will sound different to a CD, because the signal must be modified to get a good groove cut, in particular lowering the amplitude of strong bass like in this track that could cause excessive stylus swings and reduce the playing time. There tend to be lots of other eq that's applied on there, too. In short, the sound is much closer to the original on the CD than the vinyl, whatever vinyl fans may say. All this adds up to a different sound on vinyl than CD, or the original digital file created by the artist.

Boomkat looks good.

Yeah absolutely, vinyl will always sound different. Its very difficult to gauge audio in terms of quality or 'how it was intended', to the point of becoming abstract in many ways. But I've never experienced a Beatport mp3 as 'rich', but rather as if they don't use a flat EQ. At the very least not in their (lossy) encodes.

 

[RejZoR]

Ok, today I've tested many fixed versions and best one was EQ with 100Hz rumble removal preset for it. It removed all the boomy part of the bass while kept some of it intact and vocals also sound better than with Bass/Treble controls.

It's really unusual because other tracks mostly sound just fine on Beatport, except this one. Also, be aware that most of these tracks begin life as Original Mix. This is Radio Edit, which is shorter and they tend to modify acoustics for these for radio reproduction. It's possible that original sounded a bit different. I found it in a hourly mix, made from original one, but I wanted shorter straight to vocals version.

 

[qubit]

Yeah absolutely, vinyl will always sound different. Its very difficult to gauge audio in terms of quality or 'how it was intended', to the point of becoming abstract in many ways. But I've never experienced a Beatport mp3 as 'rich', but rather as if they don't use a flat EQ. At the very least not in their (lossy) encodes.

MP3 - yeah there's the problem. Even a 320 Kb/s one will be noticeably worse than the lossless original it came from. Granted it's really subtle and may not be noticeable at first, but after a while you'll realize that something isn't quite right with it.

And I couldn't agree more that judging audio is very subjective. After things like frequency response and distortion - proper, objective measurements - are taken into account, it's quite literally impossible to describe the sound without using subjective terms like "punchy", "clear" etc. This is especially true when comparing to systems that sound ostensibly the same.

 

[RejZoR]

It's not hard to describe problems that are not based on audio format, like in my case where problems exist before I bought the music. When bass is so boomy that it entirely drowns vocals, it's a major problem, because the track balance is all screwed up. All you hear is bass overdrive and vocals somewhere in the background of it, instead of other way around, vocals being on front and bass as support element.

Format alone can only affect overall audio clarity, but will rarely change or distort bass or treble to such extent to make track unusable.