multiple sound distortion

[sourcezuka]

When playing too many sounds together there is distortion.

I read in another thread mikebear wrote:

"One thing that is a known isue is that is the same percussion sound is played dually there is a distorsion, but that is simply because of clipping. 2 or more simultanious identical sounds 'doubles up' and couses clipping, whitch also is visually shown both in the mixer and the graphical visualisation display"

Yes, the graphical visualisation display shows red when playing two notes at once sometimes. When playing the notes independantly it works fine...

I can understand if realtime the CPU can't keep up with mixing the sounds together but when exporting with super oversampling 8x and 320kbps and float you would think it would take longer but the sound would be better but it still gets distortion...

any ideas on how to prevent distorition? My computer is plenty fast with plenty of ram, but this distortion problem really makes the sounds sound bad sometimes...

[sourcezuka]

I noticed if I turn the volume down it doesn't distort as much...

so it seems like the two notes added together increases the ampitude instead of simultenously mixing the notes?

I guess I don't know enough about sound engineering to really know what I'm talking about but there must be a way to mix the notes without distorting? CPU power is no problem...

[obstinatus]

I think you need to use a compressors. Just try "fast lookahead limiter" or "simple compressor" - you can find them in LADSPA fx'es.
Additionally you must spread your instruments over the spectrum. Several instruments can couse clipping on similar frequencyes - just play around with equalizer or filter

[musikbear]

incedently a new video on yT has a sugestion on how to tackle this situation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2mxf3DcQTg
The crevat using this method is that you cant have the instruments spaced in the stereo sound, but the method is interesting
BR