The Waves L1 and L2 are great. Also if your looking for quick and dirty mastering...Try Ozone.

"Loudness" isn't really the hallmark of good mastering, it's a hallmark of modern shot-to-hell mastering. For getting your mix a bit louder (don't shoot for like, 12dB or something), you'll need a good, transparant limiter. Experiment with your free ones, trying extreme settings first, to see what kind of garbage you get once the limiter is working too hard, and at what level you get it.
Pick the more transparant one you have.

Compressor BEFORE limiter, please ;)
The limiter is the last thing in the chain - it also makes sure you don't get any nasty clipping (limit to, for example, -3dB, and use only 2.7dB make-up gain).

Use the limiter for that last bit of oomph, those nasty high peaks that are keeping you from pumping your average volume up.

I dont want to be a "definition jerk", but:

Isnt a limiter a compressor with ratio set to infinity?

My advice, use a compressor like a soft limiter (not infinite compression).
If you are talking about an expander, its something else...

Quote:Original post by uncutno
I dont want to be a "definition jerk", but:

Isnt a limiter a compressor with ratio set to infinity?

My advice, use a compressor like a soft limiter (not infinite compression).
If you are talking about an expander, its something else...

Somewhat, a limiter is a brick-wall compressor - no attack (it should work instantaneously, letting no signal over the threshold pass), high or even infinite ratio (the signal over the threshold is clipped to the threshold), and a very short (or no) release time: once the signal drops back under the threshold, it should stop limiting as soon as possible.

The reason you need one (and usually a very good one) to pump your mix is because you'll have very short transient peaks in the material that may be wildly more powerful than the average level of your material. Normalisation will only work to these peaks, so you're left with a weak mix. If you limit these peaks, chopping a small amount of transients down by whatever you think sounds good, you may be able to raise your average level by as much as 6dB (or a doubling of perceived volume) without affecting your actual mix audibly, at all.

You don't want to soft-limit this stuff, because you don't want ANY of it in your material. Soft limiting and compression is for when you have significant portions of the material going over a desired threshhold (like, the slap bass in the chorus is a lot louder than the finger bass in the verse, or the singer isn't very consistent in the volume of his performance), or when you're actually trying to change your mix creatively.

In mastering, you shouldn't be trying to change the mix creatively - you should be trying to make the existing mix sound the best it can.

If you want to push the volume without clipping, you'll have to do better than using a compressor. At least none of the simpler compressors can manage peaks properly and you'll get global volume fluctuations. You need a professional volume pusher/maximizer that can handle peaks much better (a prediction system) than a compressor.

Consider doing the mastering stage of your track in a studio - if there's someone inside you know, you can probably even get in free.

PS - I have a couple of people I know and I can get a few hours of studio time every week or so (well, whenever there's no one around, which is usually for a couple of hours every week), so I could possibly spend some time trying to tweak your track if you're in real trouble - that way you won't really get what you want, I'm afraid, though, but I'm sure I could balance out your track a little in the least. PM me if you're interested.

Here are some points I want to add:

0) I'm assuming you want the "radio sound", which means adding limiting/compression in mastering, like it or not.

1) A limiter is like a very fast brick-wall compressor. You want to not make the release TOO fast, because that can create transients; you also want it to have a little bit of a knee to avoid that harsh, digital-limited sound.

2) You want to put the limiter after the compressor, as has already been said.

3) You want to use a spectral compressor. This is a compressor which divides the sound into several frequency bands, and compresses them each individually, with individual settings. Typically with higher bands are also side-chained to the lower bands.

4) Try using a soft distortion function instead of a limiter. x=A*x-B*x^3 is a good function, especially if you tweak it to get to 1.0 right when it folds back down on itself. You can jam +6 dB into this without digital clipping, but it will start distorting the sound before that point. Depending on material, this can be great, or sound like trash. (I think A = 3/2 and B = 1/2 is the optimal point)