Thanks for all your ideas. I've been away a couple of days and was surprised at all the suggestions when I logged in tonight.
The original post probably should have used a different work in naming the subject.
Yes, I should have used a different word than normalizer. I had Adobe Audition open at the time and that's what stuck in my mind.
Here is the software you need. It's free. You just simply drag-n-drop the file into the program and it will level the program material. Free, effective, and simple
I do use the Levelator and I wish I would have known about it back in commercial radio days. Would have made life so much easier.
Thank you for this link! I have played with a lot of audio processing programs and most of them do not live up to their claims.
Goat Rodeo Cowboy, you're going to get a lot of use out of it. I use it on everything our volunteers read and it works like a charm.
You could go through manually and "select" 15 seconds of content, and normalize that selection. Then select the next 15 seconds and normalize.
That's what I used to do before Levelator. Very time consuming.
I did throw one "test" at it that produced strange results.
I work with a whiz kid who who told me what she does and it seems to help. We have an older volunteer who for the longest time would not use a computer. Since she's a dependable, long-term volunteer who does all the Sunday school stuff, we let her record onto a cassette deck. To reduce noise, she would run Levelator
first. Then after, use Auditon's Noise Reduction. Her settings are:
Noise Reduction Level: 100. Reduce by 100 dB. Precision Factor: 7. Smoothing Amount: 1. Transition Width: 0 dB. Spectral Decay Rate: 0%. FFT Size: 4096 points. "Remove noise" option selected.
We finally got the volunteer to not be afraid of computers. But I still use it to reduce "mouth noise" that some of our volunteers have. With her experiments she said it was running Levelator first that was the key. I hope that's helpful.
Yes, if he is talking real time, then probably only an outboard box would work.
TomT, I think you're right. I need something coupled with the Omnia. I checked eBay and saw an assortment of Aphex Compellors. Some looked like they were good deals but I don't know enough about the different models. I just recognize the models that I've seen used in the past. It also brings up the question of is it a good deal or is it buying somebody else's problem?
