I have a new project I’m exporting to mp3. When I do there seems to be some heavy compression applied to the track on playback. The intro of the song is only 2 guitars, after a couple of bars there is a drum lead in and rest of the band kicks in. On the drum lead in the volume drops dramatically before recovering about 3 secs later. Also on the breaks were there is only one or two guitars playing the volume increases significantly. The fade out also hardly ‘fades out’ due it this effect. I only really get this effect when listening in my laptop which has realtek high definition player. This effect does not occur when the track is played on my phone but then the volume is much lower sounding when played through my phone. Hope someone can help, this is rather annoying.
Thanks
J
Hi and welcome,
Do you mean compression in sense of audio compressor or in sense of MP3 compression? Is it the same when you export WAV? Is it different while playback in Cubase?
Hi and thanks for the reply. It’s like compression in that the quieter sections of the song become loud, in fact louder than the heavier/louder parts and vise versa. It happens when done in WAV also. No, it sounds the way I what it in cubase.
Switch off the loudness equalisation in the Realtek player!
I can’t seem to find that setting for the realtek player. I’ll have to do some digging on that but it’s good to know the problem is with the realtek player rather than my mix. Thanks
Have you got this sorted johnnymac81? Only I have the same issue.
It doesn’t matter if I do an audio mixdown to wave or mp3 or whatever. I can even just mixdown one track and leave everything else out - and I’ve done with this with every track. No matter what the resulting mixdown is compressed???
I’ve even deleted all tracks, created a fresh audio track and recorded a couple of seconds of guitar or vocals completely clean not even any eq, and done a mixdown. Guess what? Still compressed!!! Appreciate any help, please.
Come on People if you expect some useful help, give some useful Information 
. You are on what System? playing back with what Player…?
I’m experiencing the same issue. I’m using Cubase 13 Artist (PC). I exported the mixdown using WAV format and the volume of all tracks dip when the kick hits (Groove Agent SE5). Anyone?
Played back on what software?
What interface/soundcard?
Playback on VLC player. Interface is Focusrite solo and soundcard is the onboard MSI Tomahawk Wifi 790 motherboard’s HD Audio chipset.
If you open your mix down in a new, blank Cubase project, does it still sound compressed?
I’m asking because this “issue” pops up every now and then on these forums and it is almost always the player used to check the mix that is at fault with some flavor of auto-gain or level matching enabled.