nightfly61 said:
BlueHen said:
When you burn CDs, does the CD itself have any effect on volume equalization?
I don't copy entire CDs, but prefer to make my own mixes of different songs and artists. Since I'm transferring from multiple sources, there seems to be a problem with stabilizing the volume on all the tracks. One track can be loud, followed by one that's soft, so I'm constantly adjusting the volume during playback.
I use Sony's SonicStage and always click the box to normalize the volume during the transfer, but it doesn't seem to make a difference.
I get the same problem when mixing continuous segued music with Adobe 1.5 even after fixing levels & Normalizing. Anyone know why?
I wish we could all be in the same room together for a few minutes so we could each demonstrate what we do with a "piece of sound". Trying to write out an explanation gets long, long, long.
The first thing I assume we need to agree on is understanding NORMALIZE. As I understand it, and as it works in Cool Edit and now Audition is that the software scans the entire selection and searches for the one loudest single peak of audio and then adjusts the entire selection from end to end with equal amounts of gain or gain reduction from end to end so that the one single peak ends up being at the normalized peak we asked for. (In Audition you tell the software whether you want it normalize to 100% (0.0 db) or 90% or 80% or -1.1 db or -3.0 db or whatever your choice. The CD Burning softwares will ask if you would like for the sound to be normalized but they normally don't give you a choice as to what the end peak level will be.
If your sound track has four or five really loud places and the rest is soft, normalization does NOTHING to make the soft places louder and the peak places softer. It takes compression and limiting to do that.
Sometimes an entire track is messed up because of one switch-click, the drum-beat, one sibilant. I used to have a laptop that would put one big thump one cycle long at the beginning of a recording. Chop that off the begining, run NORMALIZE and have a decent level. I edit a lot of recordings of church worship services. When it comes time to baptise a baby, they look up and see that lavalier mic clipped to the pastor's label and they go for it. It must look like a new toy or a new binky. Edit out that one thump and everything normalizes much better.
In editing these "live before a studio audience" type recordings I usually do a lot of tedious 'hand editing' of the little outbursts, etc. I then look for lengthy places that seem to be too soft and select them and add 2, 3 or 6 db of gain as appropriate, and reduce the gain of some really loud places. Then I will run it through a very gentle sloped compression process.
Audition has a feature that can be useful in all of this. In version 2.0 it is under 'WINDOW' and then look for 'Amplitude Statistics' on the drop down menu. Select the entire track, or a portion of a track and then pull up the Amplitude Statistics. The number I look for here is the 'Average RMS Power'. If you take a TONE and normalize to 0.0 the RMS Power number is going to be about -3.0 at best. When I get through with a mixed session of talk and music, I find it is often about -22.0 or so in RMS Power. By selecting soft and loud places and comparing the numbers, you know how much gain you want to add to the soft places.
I have found when "ripping" from a cassette tope to a digital file, if I start Audition recording and then reach over and push START on the tape playback, the end recording will likely have one of those ugly spikes from the tape machine that is about a 7.4 on the Richter scale.
Get those warts and freckles out of you tracks and then the normalize and the compression can do it's job (better?).
