I’d cut these in bite sized pieces, if possible. Maybe that’s just the way I’m used to doing stuff?
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.
When you have compressed, you shouldn’t have to use an extra amplify step. But that’s just nitpicking, as gain doesn’t “do” anything to the sound.
A good read, if you have some time to spare, is the stuff around EBU metering. A lot of people swear by 16 dB LUFS for podcasts.
FWIW I always work with the dB scale. % seems unnatural.
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.
That works fine. It was created for voice-over, I believe, but I suppose it matches a lot of podcasting work too.