Just chiming in my experience with Metallica's "Death Magnetic" CD.

I actually purchased it for $9.88 earlier today at Circuit City.

Upon ripping with EAC Secure Mode and encoding with LAME 3.98 -V0 here are what I got for the MP3s' RG values using Foobar2000 :

Album Gain value of -13.38 dB

Album Peak value of 1.246632


UPDATE:

Upon listening to the MP3s, I've noticed distortion and possible clipping on track 4, "The Day That Never Comes". I verified that it's also on the audio CD, so it's not a rip-n-encode issue.

Dude... it's all over the place. But yeah, that track is particularly atrocious.

It's not a ripping issue, the whole album is just a very POORLY mastered album produced by Rick Rubin, yet again. Which sounds like it was a mixing issue aswell. I got the same problem with my FLAC rip and LAME V2 (dam i really hate sfb21 boating) transcode.

But am glad that some mainstream listeners are quickly starting to take notice of this awfull mastering trend.

Audacity's graph of Death Magnetic's track #4, "The Day That Never Comes"

I listened to the GH 3 version of TDTNC and it sounds much better... nearly not distortion at all, listen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMbNhV-Tx4o&fmt=18

I'm still waiting for the album I ordered and I hope to get the good sounding one... let's see...

It's so painfull to look at.

And I thought Cyberwaste by Fear Factory was bad.

Wow it sounds ALOT more better then the album version, and the track itself looks hard to do later on GH3. Is there really a good sounding retail version, I thought it was only the promo version that sounded better?

I recorded the GH3 track from Youtube in Audition, normalized it, hard-limited it a bit to prevent ReplayGain from producing too relaxed results. The result is a ReplayGain value of about -6 dB. The waveform also looks quite good in comparison to the retail release. Both in the overview and detail view. Where the retail version heavily clips, the promo version also shows distortion (but not CD clipping), but the GH3 version shows absolutely no sign of clipping or heavy limiting at all!

I prepared this animated comparison image.

It does sound nice.

However, is it the actual song, or have they "digitized" it into a non Redbook audio type form for GH3?

What I mean is are just the notes stored, and then it plays back high quality samples corresponding to the notes and octaves? Something like the old school MOD trackers (i.e. MOD, S3M, XM)?

Just an assumption: They have the different instruments as separate tracks (the download is said to be compatible with the upcoming Guitar Hero World Tour which features additional instruments). If the guitar is played wrong it is either changed to a wrong pitch (long chords) or silenced for a short duration (short notes). I think all that can be done with a simple PCM version of the guitar track. The separation is only there to leave the other instruments intact when one is played wrong. But it might be more complex, though it is not really necessary in my opinion.

I think that GH3 stuff used multiple tracks metallica gave them before mixing (and they did a wonderful job) ...It seems the most logical explanation


EDIT: for complete information about the GH mix etc... take a look here:

http://damn-games.blogspot.com/2008/09/dea...r-hero-mix.html

Hi,

I've been lurking for a while but thought I'd come out of the woodwork so please bare with me if I I sound a little ignorant at times. I bought Death Magnetic on CD and for the first time on an album I've really noticed the clipping and although I love the album my ears are waving white glags by the end of it. Does anyone have the vinyl version and does it sound better?

Simon

The vinyl version is not better. It shows the same distortion as the CD version (image). But the ultimate mix has been finally found. See the post above yours.

I just compared the GH3 Version of Metallicas TDTNC. The differences are enormous. More dynamic, no over-compression, no distortion (except where they belong). With ABX compare and good headphones you switch between two worlds. Especially at the end. Here the Audacity screenshots

CD:

GH3:

I'm listening to a "GH3 release" of the album I got through torrent. Immensely better than the absurdly clipped, unlistenable original CD.

Unbelievable

I'm listening to the "Guitar Hero" version right now: UN-FUCKING-BELIEVABLE.
ReplayGain is - 4,64 dB.

Gentlemen, start your BitTorrent engines.

This shows the sad truth about how much great music we have lost during the last decades. This mastering of the album is an absolute joy to listen to - the new dynamics and (nearly) clipping free sound makes it a completely different and great album.

A lot of people around on the internet has complained about this particular album, so we could hope that this album will be a turning point for the madness.. (especially now that they can listen to how it could sound).

Article about the Guitar Hero version:

"Analysis: Metallica's Death Magnetic Sounds Better in Guitar Hero"

Interesting quote:

Since I own the Death Magnetic CD, I don't think there will be too much of stink raised if I get the GH3 version of the album off BitTorrent, since all I'm getting is a better quality version of what should have been the CD in the first place.

This is exactly what i have been thinking... We are just too optimistic..

Another article about the Death Magnetic fiasco on… erm… Tom's Guide.

just listening to the GH3 version.....

a new world for this cd.

Which GH3 version did you DL?

The GH3 version I got was a collection of FLAC recordings totalling about 540 MB because it has two versions of "Suicide and Redemption". One version of S&R is labelled K.H. and the other is labelled J.H.


After using Foobar2000 to convert to LAME 3.98 320kbps CBR, the replaygain for my MP3s of the GH3 version of Death Magnetic shows:

Album Gain = -1.86 dB
Album Peak = 0.947888


For Track #4, "The Day That Never Comes", my GH3 FLAC->MP3 shows

Track Gain = -2.43 dB
Track Peak = 0.8260007

I think the best version is the one in FLAC format and with a sample rate of 48 kHz. The version with 44.1 kHz must be resampled because the Xbox' digital audio output uses 48 kHz.

Yes! That's the version I have. The person who recorded it to FLAC from Xbox 360 did it with 48 kHz sampling and made sure the volume was set at the highest point without clipping on 99% of the album.



Here is what the GH3 48kHz sampled version of TDTNC (track 04) looks like under Audacity after converting from the FLAC to LAME 3.98 MP3 320kbps CBR:



Track Gain = -2.43 dB
Track Peak = 0.826007

I managed to get a FLAC rip of the GH3 version, omfg it's ALOT better. Someone who did the final album mixing should be named and shamed, for messing up a good album.

Also the bitrates at -V2 --vbr-new are very interesting.

Retail version at -V 2



GH3 version at -V 2

@ /mnt: Could you please post a spectral view from Track 2 of your FLAC-version? I found one on another forum. It's supposed to be from a FLAC-version, but I wonder why there is a hi-cut at about 16 khz:






Otherwise, I'm not sure, what kind of audio-format is used on this GHIII-Games. Is it uncompressed PCM?

I made a quick freq analysis on Audicty if that helps.





I highly doubt that GH3 is using uncompressed audio. Since lossy audio is really a big norm in video games nowdays, because of faster cpus and ogg vorbis. But sometimes video game devs do take lowering the bitrate abit too far, on games such as GTA 4 (Not sure about the PS3 version though) and Doom 3.

Thank you!

I highly doubt that the pic I found is really from a flac-version. Looks like a transcode to me.


BTW: Does anybody know what this is?:
http://cdon.no/musikk/metallica/death_magn...version-4042940

100% Agree

About your Encspot captures: the best FLAC version I got (48kHz, mentioned above) has 2 versions of Suicide & Redemption, named JH and KH respectively (James Hetfield and Kirk Hammet I guess). I see only one on your GH3 capture.

BTW is it only my imagination or you've got a massive metal collection there? Beware of L.A.R.S.
Napster...baaaad!

I have no idea, could be a remix album . It does look like it could be a complete different version, or just the same album with bonus tracks.



I have the exact same FLAC version, as you have describe. At 48Khz and the 2 versions of Suicide & Redemption. I just left out the JH version, when i was transcoding it to Mp3. Those 2 versions seem to be for co-op mode or something like that.



LOL

I sorta don't have to worry about the Metallicops raiding my house, since my music collection is just almost fully legit, expect the GH3 rip of Deth-Mag and a few very rare albums of course. Also my music collection is mostly Thrash, Heavy, and Industrial Metal.

I dunno. The 48khz FLAC version has frequency response on the cymbals all the way up to 24khz. No lowpassing at all.

It's a bit off topic, but I was wondering - I heard that Guitar Hero is mixing everything in real time, so you can hear that you "played" the "guitar" wrong... is it possible to extract it all separatly and mix it on your own, or just extract the band playing without vocals, and stuff like that?

The GH3 download size of Death Magnetic is about 1.4 GiB. That would be pretty much for compressed audio.

Am sorry to have been pestimestic about the GH3 version being lossy or lossless. But am glad that some game devs are using lossless audio, unlike most game devs that use lossless textures and lossy audio i.e id Software.

Rush - Signals (1982)
Santana - Festival (1976)
very, very bad equalized; sounds like cassete player with dirty head