Floren Munteanu
4:50 AM - 25 April, 2015
I always play the tracks in my DDJ-SZ/DJM-900NXS at 0 gain to avoid any type of distorted sounds and the Serato recording level set to 3aclock to have the output leveled also at 0. As soon you start seeing yellow markers on Serato recording, lower the trims or else you endup with a clipped track. This usually outputs around 90db for me. Then I run the mix through MP3Gain at 92-94db and check it if is not clipping.
I don't know if you noticed but all tracks recorded by master engineers in the '90s were always at max 90db. It is insane to see today the amount of tracks pumping 97-99db, nearly always red. Personally, every single track I own is filtered down to 94db with MP3Gain (non-destructive) and I have the autogain feature disabled in Serato. We have a mixer to adjust the sound levels, I don't understand why Serato or any other DJ software want to deliberately ruin the track sound quality.