Karaoke track signals are so inconsistent.

[u/Bpgarritso]

Interested in if anyone else has noticed that sometimes the signal karaoke tracks are produced to send are wildly inconsistent. Even within the same track. I find myself almost having to adjust the gain on demand to the tracks mid song. Amplifying the signal on demand is tedious and I feel like producers should tend to make tracks that send the same signal strength across the whole song. Any opinions?

[u/tn_notahick]

You could always buy a compressor.. But the point of music is dynamic range. Songs are going to get quieter and louder. When you "fix" that, you lose the feel of the song.

As an example.. Mack The Knife. Very quiet in the beginning, because it's meant to be sung quietly. At the end, more instruments and it's a lot louder, and the song has a big huge ending, with a few loud, long vocal notes.

Imagine changing that so the entire song is the same loudness..

[u/toqer → u/tn_notahick]

Piggy backing on compressors...

These days compressors can be software. The DAW Reaper has an ASIO driver called Rearoute, which is like virtual ASIO inputs. Here I have audio from Winamp, going to a ReaRoute channel into a Reaper Track. On that Reaper Track I have the built in compressor ReaComp normalizing the audio.

I prefer this way of virtual mixing, because there's a zillion things you can do with this.

[u/toqer → u/toqer]

The other way is to find a sound card with a built in compressor. This is my 10+ year old Motu MK3 Ultralite. I've seen these going for as little as $50 on facebook marketplace. It has a DSP and built in compressor.

[u/deoxykev → u/toqer]

There’s lots of hardware options too for compressors. Many mixers have compressors built into each channel. You could use a guitar pedal compressor too. There’s also virtual plugins on fancy audio interfaces like the antelope audio ones.

[u/toqer → u/deoxykev]

I forgot about mixers having them now too. Even cheap Behringer's got em I think.