That doesn't look bad to me. You've never used any mastering tools, have you? A lot of people automatically assume that since it doesn't look exactly the way they want it to, it's automatically bad. What did you judge the album with first, your eyes or your ears? I don't have this album, and it might sound like utter crap...however, a moderate bit of limiting (as evidenced by the waveform) is not enough to cry about. I've seen more limited albums than that sound brilliant.

Red Hot Chili Peppers - 'Californication' is certainly among the worst I've heard.

Top ten album gains in my collection (~900 CDs) right now:



That Eagles waveform doesn't look so bad to me, either. I've seen worse.

Iggy & The Stooges - Raw Power (1997 Remaster) - -16.85

Yikes. I think we have a winner.

About all that Prince stuff in the aural sledgehammer mastering category, speaking as a reasonably hardcore fan myself, it's sad but true. Starting from the Symbol Album in 1992, his stuff has become progressively more brutally mastered. If he was the one pushing for digital compression (which wouldn't be surprising considering his control freakness), then it's ironic that in "Musicology", there's a line that has something about "throw[ing] CDs out the win-da" cos "we don't need them", implying that vinyl sounds better to him - or maybe it's the nostalgia value? Thankfully his pre-1992 back catalogue hasn't yet been mauled by remastering.

What makes you think he's referring to vinyl? Perhaps it's a reference to downloading music from the internet? I don't know the track so perhaps there's something I'm missing.

One of the worst mastered records I've listened to so far is Marilyn Manson - Eat Me Drink Me.
I've always liked that Manson's records had been well produced (talking about Antichrist Superstar, Mechanical Animals and Holy Wood) but this new record is a complete joke. It is so overcompressed that it really made my head hurt.

We gotta start a website or something that has a database of replaygain values.

For everything.

That way we'd all have an idea as to whether the mastering is halfway decent or not before buying. IMO, it depends a lot on the style of music, but most stuff will end up seriously compromised if the RG is -7 dB or worse. But if it's a greater than 10 dB attenuation, then I think we can all agree that's not going to sound right, unless it's Merzbow or something.

So yeah. Let's start a website for this. Any ideas on how to set it up?

The website itself is not a big deal. But to make submitting values convenient enough for the average user there should be a player plugin that automatically submits those values.

I had no problems setting up the web site, but I have no clue about network programming in languages other than PHP. Furthermore there should be plugins for more players than just foobar2000. So who's gonna write plugins for Winamp, Amarok and so on?

Because we are talking about albums here I would only use album gain values. So, to submit an album you need the artist's name, the album's name and the album gain value. Of course, that would lead to several duplicates due to typos and sometimes there are different gain values because of different editions that have the same name, like the old 80s original version and the new 2000s remastered version. So in the end you'll have lots of trash in the database.

Alternatively you could make submitting manual and provide additional textfields for the user to specify what version it really is. There could also be a comments section. Then, everything would be more community driven. But the disadvantage might be that you only get three submissions a year because people are too lazy to copy and paste a value to a site each time they listen to an album.

But let's hear what others have to say.

P.S.: Maybe this is better discussed in a new thread.

One of the worst CDs I've ever heard is Sevendust's Animosity. Open up any of the tracks in an audio editor and you'll see incredible amounts of clipping. Plus, the liner notes say it was recorded in a barn and it sounds like it.

The worst one in my collection is Ozzy's 2002 remaster of "Randy Rhodes Tribute". I put my collection in shuffle mode, and any time a song from this album would come on it would scream at me like an annoying commercial-EXTREMELY loud, and no difference whatsoever between the quiet parts and the loud parts. The compression is so bad that the feedback and hum are actually turned up to the top between songs. I expect modern studio music to have no dynamics, but this was a live album and it was recorded in 1981. There was no excuse for this 2002 remaster. My other 3 Ozzy albums- Original "Diary", original "Blizzard", and 1995 "No More Tears", are great, but this was horrible.

Has anyone "Back to Black" by Amy Winehouse? I've heard "Tears Dry on Their Own" and the piano(!) chords, drums, orchestra all sound very very distorted. It's really painful to listen to.

Here's the album gains for what of my music collection I've scanned. It might clue you in as to the mastering on some of the more mainstream stuff there.

http://oceanbase.org/data/files/albumgains.txt

Any smart people fancy writing a foobar plugin or something, so "the masses" can produce lists like this?

Use this as your "copy command" (browse foobar2000 prefs):
...and select all your tracks then press Ctrl-C in foobar2000 and Ctrl-V in your favorite text editor.

Unfortunately there's no way to stop foobar2000 from adding a newline for each selected track. So your favorite editor better support search&replace of control characters! If that's the case you only have to replace double linefeeds(+carriage returns) with single ones until there are no blank lines left.

Oh and it helps when you sort the tracks within foobar2000 first, using the "album list" generator (browse foobar2000 prefs):
The album list generator doesn't sort very well either... it treats the replaygain album gain values as strings!!! As an alternative you can sort the albums by replaygain album peak:

Well, although this isn't perfect, I doubt that writing a plugin for this is really necessary... I mean what's the use? To post the worst/best mastered album at HA.org? Come on! "The masses" don't know HA.org anyway.

EDIT: I just found out that UltraEdit-32's numeric sort can deal with this list just well. Good luck with your favorite text editor.

Once got a chinese art CD that also had a SACD layer and the 16kHz sweep was that annoying on every track it made me wonder how this 16KHz sweep may sound on SACD
It was of this cheap souvenirs you bring back from holiday.
Huang Quin or something like this.

Agreed. I really like the album, it is a fun bit of retro production, powerful singing and good songwriting. But the amount of clipping on the tracks is egregious.

Too bad. I also hope that Ms. Winehouse survives her twenties; she might really become something.

Cruel but true. I liked her better when her skin wasn't inked and she wasn't skinny and drunky.


PPS:

Actually not such a bad idea after all... what if we wanted to know the RG values of a certain album? An online database where you can submit these values to would be neat! BUT because albums can be re-issued by the musicians and record companies, there must be a way to clearly identifiy the album issue or else we will get very different results for the same set of tracks of many albums.

But a rough and fast implementation could be done by sharing text files of one's music collection created by scripts like the ones above... they only have to be maintained "by hand" and merged into one single text file which can be posted in a forum thread. People replying to that thread can post their albums lists there.

Man, I remember listening to that album, and all it seemed to me were buzzing and the lady singing. No melody, no drums, just buzzing.

Weird. Fallen didn't seem that bad to me. I rarely got past the first track, though ("Going Under", which I used to like a lot).

It's not scandalously loud, either. 1.5 dB below Linkin Park's Meteora, 3 dB below Californication (which is still the loudest commercially released album in my collection that isn't of the "harsh noise" genre). As a counterexample to this thread, Nine Inch Nails' Year Zero is about the same loudness as Fallen and actually sounds pretty good.

The worst in my collection has to be:
Hypocrisy "Virus" the 2005 release.

The clipping is so bad throughout the whole album that it had to have been f'd up during mastering, I just can't accept the sound as a "feature" of the album. I haven't heard clipping this bad before, and I've heard some bad mastering done before on the verge of being rated unlistenable and annoying do to the clipping - but nothing before where it's been so obvious in headphones, computer speakers, and home stereo.

The RG values (track-based) of the encoded mp3's:
01. XVI = -5.45 dB
02. Warpath = -13.37 dB
03. Scrutinized = -15.14 dB
04. Fearless = -14.18 dB
05. Carving For Another Killing = -13.61 dB
06. Let The Knife Do The Talking = -13.88 dB
07. A Thousand Lies = -13.69 dB
08. Incised Before I've Ceased = -12.48 dB
09. Blooddrenched = -12.45 dB
10. Compulsive Psychosis = -13.69 dB
11. Living To Die = -14.26 dB
------------------------
Total RG value Album-based:
-14.07 dB

Just got the new F. R. David (yes, who sang "Words" 25 (!) years ago) album called "The Wheel" and it already looks *very* squashed at first glance. I can also hear some clipping throughout the songs, but slighter...(yet I might have been too used to all this)

Dynamics (almost) equal 0.

Album gain -9.58 dB
RG values: (track)
(1) -10.66 dB (2) -9.18 dB (3) -8.74 dB (4) -9.42 dB (5) -8.92 dB (6) -9.49 dB (7) -8.02 dB (8) -7.88 dB (9) -9.65 dB (10) -8.74 dB (11) -8.99 dB (12) -10.47 dB

1 and 12 contain the new "Words" versions; so it looks this has been mastered with the aim (??!) of getting near-zero dynamics to be friendly to some AC radio stations which rarely have big jumps in dynamics because it would (allegedly) irritate car drivers while driving...

Graphically it looks that the album has both been squashed to death by digital stuff AND limited because the 0 dB peaks are rare, so the music (or what has been left of it ) has been lowered in gain again.
It's the same static "block" you can see with really squashed albums; but the height is not aligned to digital zero. Beyond the block (upper/lower edge), there IS some space - but no dynamics!

Saosin - Saosin
My Chemical Romance - Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge

Compression ruins a CD much more than clipping ever will. These two albums are barely clipped, but are so compressed that your ears tire out after just 10-15 minutes of listening to them because of all the boosted mids. Add radio station compressors into the mix, and it sounds like pure static over the airwaves.

Iron Maiden - Dance Of Death (Copy Protected Version)
Iron Maiden - Somewhere In Time (Remastered Version)

They are compressed so much, the dynamics, ehh what dynamics!

Lots of clipping also, I could never make a good MP3 rip from them using LAME!

It just sounds Awful!

The Cult 'Beyond Good and Evil'. Everything is so squashed. And the drums have zero punch, they might as well not even be there.

I think it has to go to Californication. I purchased the album and thought it was defective, returned it to the store they gave me another copy and when it listened it was the same. I actually emailed the red hot chili peppers website which was run by Anthony Kiedis' father back in 1999. I sent a standard email asking why the album sounds like it's clipping. I actually recieved a reply from Anthony's father Blackie. He said the band all listened to the final master together and were happy with it.
WHAT IS THE WORLD COMING TO?????

Definitely Californication. I returned my CD to Amazon and got a refund for it.

Now some would say that this is crappy mastering, but in this case it seems like the mastering is part of the intention. Iggy wanted it this messy, it wasn't someone after the fact. True that this compression would squash and compact the sound of the album, but this album sounds great. It's not dynamic like other music, but it is not supposed to be.

On another note, I don't have the CD in front of me to calculate the RG, but Guitar Wolf's Jet Generation album is pretty damn loud!

Chris Cornell - Carry On . -10.49 db sounds very bad. Again the deception factor makes it worse. One might expect that a more acoustic driven music may mean cooler mastering, But to the contrary in this case its the opposite. Much louder than his soundgarden albums.

That's OK as long as there is a *Warning* for the consumer. Just like very HOT food in resturants, medications, energy drinks, alcoholic drinks - They give you a general idea of 'hotness', alcohol content, caffeinne level etc. We have some choice. Not so with CD's as the problem is hidden under the plastic, album art and modern 'remastering' efforts. We don't know much of the audio quality until the play button is pressed. We do know that in general modern music from 1995 ~ present is affected. At least a gain value on the back cover could save many ears and money.

I don't think a warning is appropriate. In all cases, music should be a "try before you buy" situation. There are so many other factors to consider other than mastering. Mastering style is a matter of preference and there is no perfect way. Just as there is nor perfect music. It all depends on your opinion. Trying to rate recordings from RG values seems to me to an pseudo-scientific method of applying value to music. I'd hate to see folks turning their noses up at Raw Power just because it's loud. They're missing out on a great album. In a perfect world, you could get your version of Raw Power mastered to your own preferences, but I think we're a long way off from that.

WHAT ABOUT THE LATEST MARK KNOPFLER ALBUM
I HAD TO REDUCE BASS ON MY IPOD AND BOSE HEADPHONE TO LISTEN TO IT
WHAT A SHAME

This is true, but you're missing something. I'm sure that most artists don't finish mixing their album and say "ok sweet, now take what we've worked on and suck the dynamics out of it please." That's what's happening with the loudness war! There are plenty of examples where loudness works in favor of the artist, with bands like Deerhoof, Merzbow, Pig Destroyer, et al. Raw Power is another example. But look at, for example, Red Hot Chili Peppers' newer CD releases. The drums sound as thin as paper, there's no punch! BUT when you check out the vinyl release (specifically the Hoffman mastered Stadium Arcadium), all the sudden the drums have punch and the guitar and bass come to life.

Sure, there are plenty of mastering styles. But I prefer to have my music with dynamics intact and no added distortion. I can also do without wonky EQ choices. But hey, someone somewhere has to approve these releases, so maybe we can take comfort in the fact that somebody did like the way it came out (and maybe that's what you're getting at).



There's a forum I read often that has a general hatred (really, it's hate) for digital maximization. It's beyond the point of logic, really--I've seen many an album snubbed just based on the way the waveform looks, without any thought as to how the music actually sounds. It's a shame, really, and for two reasons. For one, it's sad that CD mastering has been brought to this state (the CD was originally touted as the first consumer medium to be able to reproduce a recording's full dynamic range), and it's also pretty sad that the bias against said situation has turned so nasty that anything even remotely resembling a loud album gets written off immediately.

The issue is not one simply of mastering appropriate to the music. The issue is that the 1997 remaster sounds, to me, like ass. I posted the ReplayGain value, not because ReplayGain is even a consistent indicator of mastering, but because this number is so outrageous, and in its extreme it tells much of the tale.

The original pressing of the CD has a RG value only about half of what the remaster does, and (again IMHO) sounds much better, doesn't have nearly the bass that the remaster does, but the remaster clips very badly, and sounds like so much static.

Using ReplayGain values is a good way to measure how well an album has been mastered actually. It shows whether an album has been loudness mastered or not. If they really wanted "Raw Power" to clip all over the place they would've just clipped at -6dB and left it how it is. But instead they boosted the volume by 6dB and clipped at 0dB. This shows that the clipping was not introduced as a musical element, but instead just to get the album to be as loud as possible.

ReplayGain values should always be around 0dB. Even if clipping is introduced during mastering for some reason (who knows what mastering engineers might do these days) the album should still be mastered at a proper level.

I think I have a new worst mastered CD ever...

"Thrice - The Alchemy Index Vols. I & II Fire & Water"

The album has a Replaygain value of -8.59dB.. but don't let that deceive you because the album is quite dynamic overall. The loud bits have been pushed way over the edge, though. Clipping for minutes at a time.

While Californication actually sounded like it was mastered with a purpose, to make it as loud as possible sacrificing the music if necessary, this just sounds like it was mastered by an idiot. It just doesn't sound good by any stretch of the imagination.

I can confirm this new trend of clipped audio where RG value isn't dramatic. This is worse than the older loud albums that had some dynamics. I am feeling light headed, fatigued mentally and in also my muscles especially with night listening. I only need to listen for 10 minutes or so before it kicks in. Yesterday night I collapsed on my bed for 40 minutes with heavy fatigue after listening to music. I thought it was mental, but I loaded the tracks into audacity and confirmed my problem. The waveform looks like a wall during those parts that annoy me most. Some tracks are an entire wall.

How many people walk into doctor clinics complaining about fatigue these days - many. I wonder if doctors will eventually ask patients if they are listening to modern music. I have decided to not buy most modern albums anymore and I am selling half of my collection. I am trying to get into more instrumental , soundtrack stuff as well.

Nightwish Dark Passion Play. Previous albums where never great, but this one is the worse. RG is around - 10 making it one of their loudest. the mix sounds squashed and there is static like noise on many tracks. There are many complaints on amazon.com - IMO a disaster.

http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Passion-Play-Ni...h/dp/B000URDEB0

Paradise lost - In requiem. RG is -9. Not the loudest album by a long shot , but one of their loudest so far. I always felt that their releases had some some dynamics. Their current label Century Media has given them a 'goth metal' sound ala nightwish but not as bad. A crowded more fatiguing mix that wasn't there a few years back. Drums sound unnatural in many parts and the bass is a mush.

I think that Declip should be ported to a DSP. It should restore the waveforms pretty well, and hopefully it could cure most of this modern music.

There is no cure other than proper mastering in the first place. You can dress up the waveform with declipping algorithms after the fact, but you will never get back what you lost. And that doesn't even touch the issue of excessive compression, which is often worse than the clipping.

I've played around trying to fix horribly clipped CDs, using Wave Repair for example, but like other people I haven't found a miracle cure. I'm not even sure that there's any real improvement at all, certainly not enough to make the unlistenable listenable.

It's a real shame the damage that is done, and in my opinion audible clipping is worse than overcompression. Overcompression can make music lifeless and fatiguing, but to me heavy clipping can make it totally unlistenable. It's not hyperbole when I say that it gives me a headache...

My biggest musical disappointment in years (and easily the worst sounding CD in my collection) is the 2007 rerelease of Author Author by Scars. They're one of those lost bands of the post-punk/new-wave era that have had a bit of a revival recently. Musically they were a lot of fun, with clever lyrics and an interesting mix of influences. Unfortunately, apart from the hard to find original vinyl release, the remastered CD is the only option.

Information about the rerelease mentioned work at Abbey Road Studios to clean up the original master tapes, rather than mastering from the vinyl like a lot of similar releases. Everything indicated that they were putting time and care into making it a great release. Yet they ruined it with terrible mastering, making it sound far inferior to the original LP.

Replaygain for the album is -12.55, with the loudest track -14.24. Bear in mind that this is relatively mellow new-wave pop, not thrashy hardcore punk, or a dense wall of noise. Using Wave Repair to find clipped samples, it detects tens of thousands of examples of clipping in every track, worse than any other album I've looked at.

People have mentioned the remastered Raw Power as sounding terrible, and it does have an even higher replaygain value, but in my opinion it's nowhere near as bad. Rough and scratchy sound doesn't matter so much for that kind of garage rock, and from what I remember the clipping wasn't actually that bad. It was heavily compressed, but I don't remember Iggy Pop's vocals breaking up into static and sounding totally unnatural.

Here's a screenshot from Audacity that speaks for itself:



This wasn't a carefully selected bad section; zoom in to a loud bit in any track and you find that level of clipping.

The thing I find mind-boggling is that the person who remastered it (Steve McLaughlin) is highly experienced, in 1995 he won a grammy for Best Engineered Album. Presumably all the compression and clipping was deliberate, but I can't understand why anyone would have wanted it to sound like that...

Surely you don't need to be an ultra-picky audiophile type to notice this kind of thing?

That's about the same as Californication then. Album gain is -12.8dB with the loudest track at -14.1dB.



Believe it or not, this is the same section of the song in the unmastered version (only available in MP3 at 192k):



If you were to just look at the first waveform and not know what it was, would you think it was music, or just noise?

Man, thanks a lot for this. I didn't even know that version existed. It sounds so good in comparison... I'm finally beginning to enjoy this album without getting a headache!

Don't know about worst mastered CD but Die Sci-Fi on Wednesday 13's Fang Bang cannot be saved by Replaygain due to clipping present in the track. The actual song hits the max and statics...kind of sucks because it sounds like a good song except for that kerrrch noise at certain points. I hope there is an improvement on his new album but I am not holding my breath.

The replaygain value may be the same, but I think the clipping on the Scars album is much worse. Hard to believe, but parts of it might even make Californication sound good in comparison.

Perhaps the difference is that there actually appears to be less dynamic range compression on the Scars album. Looking at the files in Audacity, the waveform isn't as much of a solid block as a lot of similarly loud albums. Instead of losing dynamics to quite the same degree, it instead has constant and very obvious clipping distortion, which is even worse in my opinion. An example of how just looking at the replaygain stats and zoomed out waveform doesn't tell you the whole story.

Here are a couple of 15 second FLAC samples ripped from the album.

Scars samples on Rapidshare.com, 3.65Mb in total

It's been a long time since I attempted to listen to Californication, but I don't remember the distortion being quite as obvious and unpleasant as that.

Oh god yeah you are right. That is just obscene. This uses less compression but loads more clipping. Whoever approved that master must have been deaf, surely that is the only explanation.

It's not a CD but rather a record labels digital offerings..

Here's a few samples from the label 'Quosh Records':

Clip 1

Clip 2

Clip 3

Even for the type of music it is, the clipping is horrendous. Every single Quosh Records tune is like this (unless you buy the vinyl of course).

Yeah those sound bad... but are mp3 releases or wav releases. I buy Quosh Records music from Beatport in wav format and nothing like that sound that loud?

Yeah, Quosh have released a few tunes onto different services like Trackitdown and Beatport that haven't been crazily mastered like that.. but they're starting to release the loud masters on those sites as well.

Anything you buy directly from the Quosh Records site is mastered like the links in my post though.

Final Fantasy 7: Advent Children OST is really bad. I just can't stand listening to it. It feels very 'thin' and clipping can often be heard in "loud" passages. It was even like this in the movie (indeed, the soundtrack is what I mostly dislike about it)!!

Album Gain is about -11dB. I lent it some time ago and am happy that I didn't pay for it. It's the worst mastered soundtrack I know of.