Okay, after doing a lot of reading about the "loudness race" and improper mastering, I have some newbie questions. First of all, if I am looking at the waveform of a file using Audacity, what should I use for the vertical axis to see this compression. Should I be looking at the default (which appears to be some normalized arbitrary units that I don't know) or should I be looking at a dB scale? I have attached pictures below to show what I mean. Thanks for the help.

-Phil

P.S. What is your opinion of this particular song's mastering, just to let me know what I am looking at. The replaygain album gain is -9.57 dB and the track is -9.09 dB

Waveform:


Waveform (dB):

To percieve the audio compression, you're much better off with the decibel scale. The other one is a linear scale, which is not as representative of loudness. In the dba scale screenshot, you can see that all the samples are at a very near volume : sound has been compressed, and is all within a 5 db range on average (if I understand well, from the K-14 reference that is RG 0) : meaning that the loudest sound will be 32 times louder than the lowest one.. quite a low amplitude, if you think about it... Though maybe not for rock.

Peace in your mastering,
T.

Thanks for the answer. I am still a little confused here. I guess I don't really know how to actually read this graph. How do you see that all of the sound is, on average, within a 5 dB range? Also, this is a country song, so that may explain your thoughts on the low amplitude.

-Phil

First of all, by reading the graph, you can see that most white spaces at the top and bottom of the waveform are above the -5db line : that means that all sounds sounds are generally around 84db of amplitude (the 0db line being 89 db, IIRC)

also, I read in another post that the replaygain standard's 0 corresponded to 14db of headroom (this being : 0 means sound is in 14 db s worth of sonar level)
Since RG gave you a value of -9.09, that means you're 9.09 db away from that level, and so approximately 5db of headroom. which we can also read on the graph. so we're right.