Hi everyone. It’s my first time posting here - I did have a look to see if my topic was covered before and couldn’t find it - apologies if I’ve missed it
To explain what I’m trying to do and what I think my problem is:
I’m putting together a 2.5 hour mix set to play at my wedding, and am essentially using Audacity as a tool to mix the set, rather than just to record sound out of a mixer (the way I would usually use it). I want to do this so I can edit tracks down to make them shorter in places by cutting out the unwanted parts of the track (long outro’s etc), and using the fade out / fade in features to avoid any gaps in between tracks. I also want to avoid standing in front of my decks for 2.5 hours playing wedding music!
My idea was that I would be able to use the amplify feature to gain up the tracks so they are all the same volume as the loudest track in the mix.
The problem I’m having is that when I load an MP3 directly into Audacity, they load incredibly loudly. When I record music from my decks I would reduce the record volume to ensure against clipping and have the levels way below +1 to avoid distortion. I can’t seem to do this when loading mp3’s directly in. I’m therefore having to use amplify feature to input a negative value to bring the levels back down, and I’m pretty sure I’m losing a lot of sound quality by doing this, which won’t be good enough!
Is there any way of loading MP3s up at a reduced volume without compromising quality? Am I simply using this programme for something that it’s not intended for? I really want to avoid having to record the whole thing out of my decks if I can help it - any advice would be greatly appreciated!