Normalising tracks

[G. I. Raffe]

Hello - Is there a way of getting a group of tracks of varying levels, and normalising them to the same level?

 

I'm guessing there is no easy way to do this, and it requires doing it by ear

 

Cheers

[ascdi]

People are gonna say "well you COULD [blahhh]" but really the answer is, no, there is no good way to do this, and you should do it by ear.

[Guest kokeboka]

I think most DAW's have a Normalize function for audio processing - wouldn't that work?

 

edit: or are you talking perceived levels and not actual db levels?

[Guest ryanmcallister]

perceived loudness no, as this is done by ear. but if you are asking about simply normalizing a bunch of tracks to 0db at once, that is called batch processing, and can be done by several software audio editors and stuff like that.

[Silent Member]

but don't do it.

[G. I. Raffe]

ok, that's what I thought. Cheers all

[Guest Promo]

What you're dealing with is the RMS. Most mastered tracks these days have an RMS of about -10 to -8db and some drum n bass tracks are even louder like -6db.

 

The way to get your tracks to the same loudness is to open up your track in Soundforge and check the RMS of the loudest part on the waveform. It will probably show an RMS of about -18db. You need to get that up to about -10 to -8db for it to sound loud. I use Waves Ultramaximizer to do this by usually dropping the threshold to about -15db and the output to -0.1db to allow a little headroom so it doesn't clip. Of course how far you drop the threshold depends on how loud the track is already.

 

Also hear how it sounds once you've done that as you may need to go back a play with the eq and levels of the individual parts that make up your original track so it sounds good once you compress it again.