Audacity/Pamela recording issues - Normalizing audio levels

Special Interest Groups Audio Processing
1

Hello,

Recently I recorded a podcast interview via Skype with Pamela and the interviewer (me) is much louder than the interviewee. Been messing with normalization but it doesn’t seem to fix it as I am still WAY louder. Is there a specific way to fix this?

I have just started out with Audacity so bear with me. =) Before posting I read all of the documentation and searched the forum but I can’t seem to figure this out. =( Any help or pointers are deeply appreciated!

Thanks!

2

You could use the envelope tool to equalise the volume of interviewer and interviewee … http://audacityteam.org/onlinehelp-1.2/envelope.htm

Alternatively individually select each portion of interviewee’s speech and amplify them by the same amount so are the same volume (amplitude) as your voice,
the amplify effect can be found by clicking on “Effect”, “Amplifier”, “Amplify”. Once you have established the right amount of amplification you can select sections of interviewee’s speech individually then click on “repeat amplify” which should then be on the top of the “Effects” list. Using the envelope tool permits smooth graduations of amplification, when using “Amplify” the changes in amplification will be abrupt.

3

There are various ways to improve the mis-match voice level using Audacity, but they are all a bit of a pain and time consuming. It would be much better to fix the problem in the original recording, but I’ve never used “Pamela” so I’ve no idea about the correct set-up procedure. You would probably be best checking the documentation for Pamela first. Since Pamela is commercial software, I would assume that they offer some form of help/support?

4

Trebor,

Thanks for taking the time to help me! =) I will try working on that tonight and then let you know how it goes.

Thanks and enjoy the weekend,
J

5

Tx for getting back to me. The recording is already done and my question is about fixing the file with Audacity. I now have an MP3 that I need to “fix” the volume levels in and I am going to try what was suggested above.

Thanks again!
J

6

You might have some joy with “Chris’ Dynamic Compressor”. It’s a Nyquist plug-in that you pop into your plug-ins folder. It’s not really designed for what you are wanting to do, but with a bit of tweaking it will probably help a lot. You should be able to easily find it with Google.

7

That and you may have made an error. Trying to fix a compressed and damaged MP3 is a lot harder than trying to manage a high quality, perfect, uncompressed WAV file. Do you have the original Audacity Project? If you don’t that’s strike two. Sorry, three.

The paid version of Pamela is reputed to be the top quality way to record conversations like this and it pays greatly to figure out how it works. Maybe the easiest way to rescue the show with minimal artifacts is the envelope tool. That’s the two white arrows and bent line tool in the upper left. That lets you manually change the volume just by watching the blue wiggly line and dragging the control lines around.

I keep meaning to ask somebody because this comes up often. How much is a paid Pamela license?

Koz

8

You’re using the wrong Pamela…

https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/skype-pamela-product-info/10111/1

Koz