I’m typically cleaning up 2-3 hour recordings and the process I have been using looks a little like this:
- Noise reduction - I switch the track to DB view to do this because it shows the noise better.
- Limiter - depending on the starting volume this can be down to -10 or not quite that far, basically the goal is to kill the massive peaks.
- Amplify - This will make everything louder again, but now your peaks are much smaller it will make the quiet parts louder.
However just this week I’ve had the RMS-Normalise plug-in recommended which I’m putting in this process instead of Amplify and seems to work pretty well as an alternative.