Ive just made my first drum n bass song and wanted to export it.
When i played the MP3 file something i did not make in FL Studio happened. The snare and some other instruments volume sometimes was lower than other times and it does not sound good. I have tried many different export settings but still the snare gets ruined.
You song is probably clipping; FL Studio uses 32-bit float, therefor inside FL Studio your song cannot clip. See it this way, if your volume would've gone over 0dB in any non-floating point file type, a floating-point type just moves the 0dB along with your highest peak. So your highest peak would count as the 0dB point.
Anyway, you can fix it by adding an EQ2 to your master, post all effects but pre-limiter/compressor. In that EQ2 you do nothing with the bands, but the main volume slider you lower until your volume peaks well below 0dB.
Then you can use a limiter or compressor to restore the lost volume, since both a compressor and limiter are in fact "dynamic volume sliders", you can give some gain to the song while cutting the peaks off.
The EQ2 thing is handy if it's already too late, but next time you make a song you want to do your mixing in such a way that on the master track, without any effects, the volume stays well below 0dB. This is the ideal situation.
Obviously things are wrong at mixingtime.
Don't have any of your mixer channels go constantly to the ceiling.
(like it says on the FL studio bible: look behind you on the wall, if you see a constant red glow from your mixer you're doing it wrong).
I mix all my channels at -10db and then compress them on the master to avoid this kind of mess.
__ Check my soundcloud (exclusive tracks on there)
say I throw a soundgoodizer on the master (i know it will sound terrible but) can I just drive any of the mixer channels leading to the master without the track clipping? or does the soundgoodizer/maximus stop clipping....
Bcuz whenever i export to mp3, the volume starts out loud, but then totally dips when it gets to the heavy drum/percussion parts, when it should be getting louder
The soundgoodizer is basically 4 presets to showcase the abilities of Maximus; so an important part of what it does is compressing & limiting.
To check out and see for yourself why soundgoodizer won't fix your mixing problems, disable your soundgoodizer and replace it with a maximus, the presets a, b,c and d represent the presets in soundgoodizer.
Now send a basic amen to that channel, and give him a way too big boost with EQ2 or whatever effect plugin you like.
As you will see, does some compressing here and there, but an important part is limiting too; the result is maximus will be compressing with a certain threshold based on a normal input signal. But since your input signal is off the shelf (in certain parts!), it will give a result that will sound like you compressed a normal signal peaking slightly under 0dB with a -40dB threshold or something. Ugly, in other words ;-)
The problem you have is probably caused by not properly equalizing your mix; there's some guides on the forums here but basically you need to give every instrument its place in the mix and mostly do this by cutting and not boosting. Cutting will not push your volume up, obviously, but more importantly you won't be pushing some frequencies on track 1, and then come to track 4 and find that you should push those frequencies too there, making track 1 sound too quiet, etc
Also if you're always cutting and lowering volumes, the mix that arrives on the master will be suitable for compressing and limiting.
If a part should be louder than another, turning the other stuff down is always better. As said, in digital you cant go beyond 0, so if your intro is already at -1, you cant go much louder than that after the intro without sounding either compressed (with soundgoofizer or whatever) or clipping.
