Something weird with Studio One

I’ve been using Studio One for (almost) all my music work for ages now.

But only recently, when I started doing some things (that weren’t that easy/possible in S1) in other DAWs, I noticed something weird: Studio One makes everything less loud?

When inside S1, anything I play back sounds significantly softer than when I export the file as an MP3 and listen anywhere else.

I can literally work on a song and comfortably hear it at a certain volume, but when I close S1 and listen to the mixdown of what I was just working on at the same volume, it’s uncomfortably loud.

I’ve searched the settings, I’ve checked any templates or defaults, I keep checking if I accidentally lowered my “Main” bus or something, but it’s none of that. It’s just something built into the software, I suspect, or how it interacts with my specific laptop (which is also the only device I’ve had for ages now). Reinstalling does nothing, I’ve tried it all.

More people have this issue of “playback just being a bit softer inside S1”, none with satisfying answers. It doesn’t feel like a bug really, or that annoying. It’s just something I had to learn about.

When I bought my first proper microphone and audio interface, and connected it to S1, I thought I had made a mistake and bought something with very little gain. But I was just being an idiot and had my audio interface set to split the sound 50% between DAW and input, meaning everything I played back was half as soft as it actually was. (And it mixed in the room noise from the microphone as well, meaning I’d constantly hear myself sniffling or shuffling over the playback, thinking the recordings had to be redone.) The fact that S1 also lowered the volume a bit, gave me a few panicky hours back then.

By now, I’ve learned that basically any microphone/interface will have a very low noise floor, so you can record things quite soft and always go louder/softer afterwards. My gear, even though it’s quite cheap and old by now, is as good as any. If it has any problems, volume is certainly not one of them :p

Still, if you have this as well, or know what might be the problem, let me know.

(One of those other DAWs is Reaper. Whatever I put into that is just so much louder than anywhere else. So they are doing the same thing, but in reverse? Or is that the actual volume of the track? I don’t know, but I’ve learnt to live with it, as I don’t have money for newer and better hardware :p)

Onto better music! Tiamo