Normalising a track after mixing and exporting it

[rhynoclemmis]

Dear board,

If I finish recording and mixing and mastering and all that, will there be any sense in normalising the track? Or will that just destroy all the fine tuning I made? What do you do?

The reason I thought about normalising is of course to bring all my tracks to the same volume level so they don't vary between songs.

Thanks, rhyno

[ShredRex]

You might be better off applying a hard limiter to get a uniform volume as compared to normalizing.

[blue4u]

I haven't had great success with normalizing. All it is going to do is bring your peaks up to maximum but if you have a lot of sharp (high) peaks in your waveform then, it won't give you much of a boost in volume. I would go for the limiting option that ShredRex mentions. There are many plugins that do this but you'll want to take the audio wav file into another program. I would suggest Reaper as an excellent option! It has a limiter plug-in included: http://reaper.fm/download.php

[mickeymix]

I 3rd the Limiter option compared to the normalizer.....as Blue4U said....I also haven't had much success with the normalizer.

[cwight]

I think you'll find Audacity will do both normalisation and hard limiting and it's free.

[gatorjj]

Normalising just brings the volume of the overall track so that the highest peak is just under 0. If you've already brought the volume up as part of the mastering phase then there's not anything for the normalize function to do.

What you probably hear is the difference in average RMS, which comes off as perceived loudness. I don't know of a tool that will take a bunch of songs and normalize the "average" so they all are perceived the same, though there's probably one out there somewhere.

It's probably best to A-B compare one to another when mastering so they come out sounding about the same, like you'd do when mastering a full CD.

[rhynoclemmis]

Aha. Thanks. I didn't even know a thing like a "hard limiter" exists. I'll give that a try, if needed. I guess gatorjj's option is probably the best.

[cwight]

gatorjj has some great advice re mastering in Audacity. I'll see if I can find the thread.