sanshouheil wrote:
So here is an issue we recently have come across.
Apparently, if a recording is not significantly compressed. Or as I have heard it termed Radio Mix or Radio Mastered. You don stand a snowball chance in hell of getting airplay. Something to do with format and volume I think.
You may consider it somewhat silly for an amateur band to be concerned about airtime, but, If one is going to record a CD. Would one not want to create at least a window for the opportunity ?
That being said. I thought our CD sounded great after being mixed down. And that it got fluked up in the mastering stage.
I really wish I knew more about this. But the learning curve looks like a full circle from where I sit. 
Compression has nothing to do with "radio quality" master recordings. Those 'demos' I put up last fall were all radio quality in the engineering, but just demos and the instrumentations were lax, so that's why they were demos. We actually used zero compression outside of what was preamped on the instruments by our own gear.
The recording quality (sharp, clean, loud, and fresh) determines radio friendlyness, not the compression.
Look at it like this:
Would you take a delay pedal and run an enitre master through it, applying the entire delay to the mixed recording?
I used some compression on ONE of my guitar tracks, to get a specific amount of tone vs. gain and that was all. The bassist used more compression to get the attack he wanted. That was it. This is a bit of 'dumbing down' the real application, but I don't want to write a book about it, either.
