I did not listen to the original mix before starting to work on the song.

[Christian Schulte]

Feels overpowered even while listening on my headphones, which have very moderate low end response.

Used some moderate EQ only on the low end - that is - only filters in use are low shelf. That makes it appear overpowered. I'll fix it. Will also add a compressor to the snare and kick tracks.

I like your first mastered version. Second master for me sounds over-compressed and the problem is still there.

Mastered file is kind of "maximum gain". I completely dislike it myself. I'll update this thread the next days. Maybe I just need to decrease the listening level while mixing. We'll see.

Update 1: Very terrifying to find out about how different the MP3 version sounds compared to the WAV version I listened to locally. What so ever. See the attached version. I added compression and gates to the drum tracks. Found out about an issue with the bass track and fixed it. Then hit CTRL-S and overwrote the previous settings so there is no turning back. What you describe as overpowered really is the lame mp3 codec throwing away an awful lot of high frequencies that were present in the source wav file. I'm converting the mix WAV files like so:

Code:

lame -V0 -ms -q0 --resample 44.1 --clipdetect source.wav

The tracks were mixed at 88.2kHz. I just compared the original WAV file to the resulting MP3 file and that made me want to jump out of the window. That's the blanket over the speakers. Really. What I ended up with now really is not any way better than before. Just the MP3 version does no longer lack that much detail. I'll never do something like this again in the future. That's for sure.