Old 09-09-2008, 09:51 PM   #1
brandondmorris1
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Default normalizing....

what exactly does normalizing do? i just "normalized" several tracks of an all vocal arrangement and i can now see the signal where as before the signal was too small to see and i see it made each track have a lot of volume boost. so what exactly all happens in this process?
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Old 09-09-2008, 10:49 PM   #2
Art Evans
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Normalising makes the loudest bit of the audio peak exactly to the top of the meters.

When you normalise a group of clips, there are two modes - one where the amount of gain applied makes the loudest part of the loudest item go to the top, amplifying the others in proportion (so that the actual variations between them are maintained) and the other mode makes the loudest bit of audio in each individual item peak to the top, thus breaking the loudness relationship between them.

You can also amplify the appearance of the waveform without changing its loudness - shift/uparrow is the standard keystroke for that (and shift/downarrow to make it smaller).
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Old 09-10-2008, 12:48 PM   #3
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I would like to add that normalizing is a "fix" of a sort because as the audio is normalized, so is the noise floor.

Try to get a strong/clean signal input when recording for best signal to noise ratio.
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Old 09-11-2008, 05:50 AM   #4
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Quote:
Originally Posted by martygras View Post
[...]so is the noise floor.
Reading that, it came to me that a normalize function would be a lot more useful if it had a threshold parameter rather than relying on low levels being boosted somewhat less. Though I agree that the best option is having a strong signal in the first place, there are times....
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Old 09-11-2008, 05:57 AM   #5
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Quote:
Originally Posted by phillip2637 View Post
Reading that, it came to me that a normalize function would be a lot more useful if it had a threshold parameter rather than relying on low levels being boosted somewhat less. Though I agree that the best option is having a strong signal in the first place, there are times....
Normalize boosts all levels equally. There's nothing magical about normalize, sometimes it's useful, sometimes not so much. Best really just to try to record a strong signal in the first place...
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Old 09-11-2008, 06:24 AM   #6
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Just to be clear, normalizing a track is literally the same as raising the track volume fader until the highest peak touches -0.1 db or so.
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Old 09-11-2008, 08:01 AM   #7
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Just to be clear, normalizing a track is literally the same as raising the track volume fader until the highest peak touches -0.1 db or so.
Ah! I'd previously worked with something that had a function that proportionally adjusted volume, essentially increasing the dynamic range so that the peak changed as you say, but low volumes changed very little. They called it 'normalize' and I'd assumed that was the common definition.

(Which led to the idea of a 'threshold', below which levels would be locked.)
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