calimerox, may I also suggest you do a blind test with rtp405’s mastered file and your original with the volume knob raised to match his level.
That’s the purpose of that big round knob you see on your stereo, you know; to make a recording sound louder. And I bet there is a device like that on every listening equipment you’d come across.
Yes, louder often sounds better but you don’t need mastering to achieve that.
peder, thx for your advice, and yes, I know that big knobs. Actually I´m often asked to make something “louder” or “fat” or however you call it when it comes to mastering, and I get your point that louder is just louder, but loudness is not just louder. if you have a decent recording and master it so that it sound louder, you finally also have a better signal to noise when the consumer put it in his consumer mp3player or whatever it is(if you don´t limit too hard), it feels louder and the average volume is louder… I´m not in pro of having generally everything squared to 0dB, but often it´s an issue for semiprofessional studios that what you get out doesn´t sound loud, e.g. a rock band. and the idea of a rockband is to sound loud (maybe this is a major mistake of rock music, but thats another story…)… therefore for me loudness is a good thing to know.
On a recent (latest?) Metallica album, people playing Guitar Hero realised the version on there was way better than the cd. They had been mastered differently and I think even the band agreed the game version was better. The game version had much better dynamics; the cd version pushed loudness:
Guns 'n Roses latest effort is apparently mastered with decent dynamics, so it seems even the heavy rock boys are learning the mistake of ‘pretend loud’. Here’s what the engineer says about the experience: he offered three versions and the band chose the one which had dynamics preserved:
http://www.gatewaymastering.com/gateway_LoudnessWars.asp
And here’s a description of how dropping dynamics in favour of loudness is a bad idea:
master it so that it sound louder, you finally also have a better signal to noise when the consumer put it in his consumer mp3player
If buy that you mean a more even signal versus the listeners surrounding noise I agree. For my jogging mp3player I actually normalized the soft parts of Frost*s EIMA to be able to enjoy it, but the question is: who are we mastering for? Is it the jogger, the DJ at the loud party or the concentrated listener?
Perhaps all records should be released in two versions: a hifi version for the purists and a brickwalled version for the jogger/party DJ.
And if you want a rockband to sound loud dynamics and eq:ing are the way to go. When you have a dynamic span of 3 dB’s you don’t sound loud, you just sound even.
I’m glad Bob Ludwig and G’n’R went the dynamic way: http://www.gatewaymastering.com/gateway_LoudnessWars.asp
(Edit: hey, pleasebeus, you beat me to it 
And to be fair, regarding the latest Metallica the mastering engineer claims the levels were already hard brickwalled (as in visible square waves in any wave editor) when he got the stuff.
Listen to “Broken, Beat & Scarred” or “The Judas Kiss” to hear the terrible distortion.
peder, i got your point with the dynamic span, its not that I like it “even”, its more that usually I like dynamics too much, or when I listen back on it on my monitoringsystem, I enjoy full dynamics, but the “use” of music takes place in subways, streets, kitchens, TVs… and like usually you should listen and produce with similar conditions like the final consumer listens to, but thats difficult nowadays… we should maybe open a mastering contest 
but again, what is discussed here partly is a question of taste, but I was mostly interested in how people just do it and are happy with it for themselves, whatever they are working on… like for me the last good metallica album was kill 'em all… but this was definitley bad mastered… …
you must be taking the piss rtp… what about nasty spikes in particular frequencies… what about issues with mastering for vinyl… I wish it was as easy as you said…
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Just a line to tell you off my mastering changes.
I have to installed Ubuntu Studio 18* with Ardour 5.
After reading this thread I’m surprised that some off you don’t use Jamim, as I have always defaulted to this.
As Jamin has a tendency to quit without saving I thought I’d try look at mastering with Ardour.
Got to say I’m really surprised by the quality off the plugins.
I am now using :
Eq X42 Eq by Robin Gareus ( very very nice sounding EQ)
Dyson Comp By Steve Harris ( a musical Comp at last)
Tap Reverb by Tom sZilagyi ( very controllable Plate rev)
DR14 Dynamic Range meter ( giving me a DR off around 12)
These alone will give you 95% of any mastering you may need.
Many thanks to all the developers and Ardour teams.
Please note I play all my instruments apart from drums and don’t use Midi at the moment.
Cheers All.
Bob
There’s a general consensus in the archives of this forum that Jamin doesn’t sound very good, and can sound really bad on some compressor settings. It’s also said to use a lot of CPU power.
Now you say it tends to quit without saving and you’ve found some good plugins for mastering, and you wonder why people don’t use Jamin!
I have the LinuxDSP multiband compresssor, which unfortunately no longer seems to be available since they became OvertoneDSP. Not that I use that much for mastering - I’m aiming for natural sounding recordings of acoustic instruments and voices and use very little processing for mastering. But a good quality EQ, compressor and limiter will get you a long way.
I use Tracktion’s Master Mix (https://www.tracktion.com/products/master-mix) multiband compressor (and EQ) for mastering, it is not free but also not too expensive when on sale. And it offers lots of flexibility to perform subtle correction and fine tuning.