Just start using Audacity (1.3.11beta Mac) since I switched to a Mac. I had been using Sound Forge on Windows. I’ve got a live recording I made with my Sony D50. It sounds great except for one song where the audience is clapping along to the music. Since the audience was closer to the mic than the musicians, I ended up with the music around -18dB with regular -3dB claps. I want to normalize the whole thing up to -3dB, but the clapping is throwing things off.
Any suggestions on how to automatically limit just the hand claps? I could use the pencil tool but it would take a month!
You might find some value in Effect > Click Removal. That’s designed to suppress clicks and pops on phonograph records, but I think it just works by sensing very high level and reducing it.
Thanks for the pointers! I tried a few things and came up with a quick solution that worked pretty well. I just tweaked the settings of the Hard Limiter effect to chop off anything louder than the music. This brings down the peaks of the clapping and let’s me then normalize the entire track. I guess it’s technically distorting each clap, but it doesn’t really matter in this case.