Loudness wars

Determined to be more greedy it seems all major labels are engaging into the loudness war instead of trying to deliver good quality music to the fans.
Case in point, Death magnetic from Metallica. Finally a decent album again, and Warner screws it up by driving compression on it up to the point of distortion.
They should be ashamed that a game company (Guitar Hero) can mix it into an enjoyable album (which will be the version I'll buy, not the game itself though).

With that in mind I had a look at Otherside from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. A great song, yet the same problem; compressed too high...
Thank open source developers for Audacity though;


Reversing the high compression on Red Hot Chili Peppers' Otherside

At least, the attempt to with Audacity and the Hyperexp plugin.
-import the wav or flac file in Audacity
-open the hyperexp.ny file, change (let ((min 0.001)) to (let ((min 0.5)) and save it
-run the hyperexp effect with normalize set to 0
-open the equalization effect, set every band to -4dB, except 3.15kHz to -8dB
-keep bands 31, 40 and 50kHz at 0dB with the surrounding bands decreasing in steps of 1dB to -4dB
-set filter to cosine, lenght to 2929 and run it
-run amplify effect without enabling clipping
-run click removal effect with default 200/20 settings


This has resulted in a cleaner, dynamic sound that enabled me to listen to it without hurting my ears, even at high volume.
Hopefully the labels will get the Slashdot tag suddenoutbreakofcommonsense soon.