Hi everyone,
I’m having trouble with audio quality when posting Digitakt II recordings to Instagram and would appreciate any workflow suggestions.
The problem: I’m getting pops and clicks across various frequencies that only appear after uploading to Instagram. The source files play back cleanly on my laptop and through Google Photos, so the artefacts seem to be introduced during Instagram’s processing.
I am trying to figure out what I am doing wrong and would appreciate if you could share your own workflow.
My process is as follows:
- Plug in Digitakt II to laptop in audio mode.
- Launch recording software (Ocenaudio) and select DTII as input.
- Jam on DTII and record. It records fine at a low volume as expected.
- I tried the following: normalising to 0db gain, normalising to -6db, not normalising at all and leaving at the current recorded level. I also tried using Youlean loudness Meter 2 plugin with the setting of integrated -16.0 LUFS, True Peak -2.9 dB.
- Save the audio as wav, replace audio in a video from phone in a dedicated software like DaVinci Resolve or similar.
- Export the video and upload to Instagram.
I reckon I should be using Overbridge to record, but not sure it will make any difference, considering that I normalise the audio and also that the issue only occurs on the final stage. Here is an example of where this happens (it’s audible right away in the video). If I do use overbridge, not sure whether I should apply utility at the end of the chain or do something else for audio?
UPD: Sorted this out. I imported original (quiet) recording in Davinci Resolce, set target loudness in Project Settings (I used -16 LUFS for Instagram), then play through and check the Integrated reading - this shows how many dB of gain you need to add. Add gain via track and bus faders (bus maxes at +10 dB), then add a limiter on Bus 1 with ceiling set to -1.0 dB to control true peak. Reset the meter and verify Integrated is at 0 and TP is around -1.0 dBTP before exporting.