Mastering

Until this point, I have produced my songs in LMMS to the very last bit, also done the mastering in LMMS. When I tried to master with Audacity and its built in compressor and leveler I couldn't reach the level my LMMS-mastering was at without messing up.

Today though, with my latest song soon to come out, I matched the sound level from LMMS in Audacity. So I could now choose which one I would want to use. 

The top waveform is mastered with Audacity, and the bottom is pretty unmastered LMMS, I would definitely worked more with it or lowered it a bit you see. So basically this picture gives me a very good reason to master with Audacity, a lot less peaking! 

One could probably achieve less peaking and the same level in LMMS if one added limiters and/or compressors on the master in addition to a lot of tweaking. However exporting a sound with low levels to Audacity and then amplifying, leveling and compressing seems to give me better control over the peaking. One can immediately see when it is going to peak. UPDATE: Leveling is only limiter and compressor combined, so using only the compressor is a better alternative.

With that said, although the bottom waveform seems like distortion all the way, I cannot hear so much distortion because of peaking in the LMMS version. So it isn't that bad, and again, I had only worked a small amount on the mastering in LMMS.