Using Normalization effect

[shseas]

I recorded an entire choral concert with a portable recorder (MicroTrack 24/96). Although it was placed towards the rear of the room, the quality was quite good. The controls (volume) were not changed during the entire performance.

There is considerable volume difference between numbers, which I do not want to alter much, as it was an intentional diference, though not as marked as evident on the raw recording

Now the problem: The suggestion in the Effects section of Help is to make all other edits BEFORE normalizing. I wonder if it couldn't be done on the entire raw recording to ensure proper balance throughout.

Would it be possible to make this the initial edit, then make necessary edits to sparate tracks and do fade in/fade outs, etc.

Any help would be appreciated!

SHS

[musikone]

I recorded an entire choral concert with a portable recorder (MicroTrack 24/96). Although it was placed towards the rear of the room, the quality was quite good. The controls (volume) were not changed during the entire performance.

There is considerable volume difference between numbers, which I do not want to alter much, as it was an intentional diference, though not as marked as evident on the raw recording

Now the problem: The suggestion in the Effects section of Help is to make all other edits BEFORE normalizing. I wonder if it couldn't be done on the entire raw recording to ensure proper balance throughout.

1 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Certainly, if this is the balance that you want. It all depends upon how interrelated are the various sections of the file that you are editing. In many instances the file may consist of separate sections that you are going to split up into different files, and you do not need to balance the volume levels for these various files. On the other hand, if you wish to achieve a level balance over some length of time, then by all means normalize over this total time length. Even if you intend to split up the one file into several smaller files, it might not prove to be undesirable to do the normalization over the entire length of the file that is being edited, _before_ it is split into separate pieces.

1 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Would it be possible to make this the initial edit, then make necessary edits to sparate tracks and do fade in/fade outs, etc.

Any help would be appreciated!

2 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Certainly. However, when normalization is done in this manner, it is possible that certain parts of the file may have an undue influence upon the volume level in other not-too-closely-related parts. For example, when the entire file is normalized first, a loud section of the file may unduly depress the volume level of some other section of the file. But if the file is split up into pieces _before_ normalization, then the loud section is perhaps confined to just one of the split files; as a result, the lower-volume sections of the remaining pieces will not be depressed by the influence of that loud section of the file being edited.

 

I realize that this is an awkward explanation, but study it a bit and perhaps you can make some sense of it. Incidentally, I deal with this exact type of problem continuously in my processing of classical music recorded from an FM tuner. That is, determining the relationships of various parts of a length file in deciding whether to normalize across the entire file and then split, or alternately to split first and then normalize the individual pieces afterwards.

2 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Musikone

Been there, done that!

 

 

SHS