Compression of final mix causes loss of fidelity

[thenewrobot]

I've done a lot of searching on the board and know the cause of my problem, but not how to fix it. Hopefully some of you experienced folks can help me out.

I am very new to home recording, but am learning quickly and moving right along. My problem is what happens after recording is done.

I am running nuendo on a pc and recording at a sample rate of 192. I do my editing and mixing and get everything sounding perfect, but I have no clue how to get my 200+ megabyte Nuendo Project file to turn into a 3-5 megabyte Mp3 file without making it sound terrible.

This is what I've been doing: export>audio mixdown>adjust settings to save as an mp3 stereo interleaved file (this is where we lose all of that fidelity)>save file

I also run my entire song through a Waves dithering plug-in, and that helps, but still isn't even close to listenable when all is said and done.

I just need to know what needs to be adjusted during the final step to make my nuendo project file into a pristine mp3 suitable for posting, say, in the bash-that-mix topic.



Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

[Electriclight]

MP3 will always have less fidelity but if it's unlistenable then something is wrong. Are you sure the output is not clipping? Put a brickwall limiter on the 2 bus. Also, have you experimented with mixing it down to a 24bit wav. file and then converting to MP3. It's worth a try.

[drago]

You could be clipping which a lot of times isn't very noticable in the DAW but sounds like ass after you bounce. Try doing a bounce to WAV and then use iTunes to convert to mp3 and see if it still sounds bad.

[CyberCat]

Your mp3 settings could be a problem, but try bouncing to wav and then converting that to mp3.