9-Band Dynamic Mastering Suite for Reason Studios
If you've already purchased the above rack extensions and the FabFilter mastering plugins, you should be able to load _Project with no issues. Once it is loaded, you can import any audio track you want. BE SURE TO NORMALIZE PEAK LEVELS TO 0 DB. You can do this either in Reason itself or beforehand in another program, e.g. Audacity.
Once you have imported the normalized track, you should generally be good to export the audio without making further modifications, however, you may have more success trying one of the following:
- Play the full length of the track within _Project. Then, open each of the 9 limiters in the 'DM9 - base' combinator and find the band with the loudest observed peak level. Next, adjust the band gain control on the combinator to add enough gain to raise that peak level to 0db. Then run the export.
- Play the full length of the track within _Project. Then, adjust the gain level for each of the 9 limiters and independently set each to raise its peak level to 0db. Then run the export. You may need to be careful with tracks that have a lot of background noise when setting bands 7-9 and may want to consider adding less/no gain to prevent introducing unwanted noise.
Once the export is complete it is up to you what to do next. If this is a song meant to be uploaded to a streaming platform, I would recommend using Audacity to normalize the track according to perceived loudness (effects -> Loudness Normalization; set the LUFS value to -14 [youtube,spotify]). This should give you a positive gain boost, so you will likely want to run a final limiter over the result before exporting the final track to prevent clipping.
Loosely defined, sensitivity is the degree to which the band processor adjusts itself when there is a change in the input signal. It also reflects how long it takes to recover from periods of intense signal. Generally, you should scale the sensitivity levels proportionally with frequency. 9 bands makes this pretty easy as you can start at 0 for band 1 and add 16 for each band until 9.
I've added automation lanes for this already so all you need to do is adjust the values as you see fit.