Hi all! I am mixing 40 tracks to 1 final export. All single tracks don’t have distortion or are not loud at all.
However, combining all 40 of them does give a few peaks in the final export (which sound strange, because Audacity automatically reduces the volume of these peaks while rendering).
Therefore my question is: How to decrease the volume of the final mix, without ruining the balance which I created in all of the 40 tracks? Of course I can set every single track -2dB, but I’m not sure what this does to the audio-mix.
Export as WAV, 32-bit float. Floating point (which Audacity uses “internally”) has essentially no upper or lower limits.
Re-import the stereo mix and run the Amplify or Normalize effect for whatever peak level you want. (If you are configured to Show Clipping you’ll “see red” for potential clipping, but it’s not actually clipped (yet).
Export to your desired format.
Mixing is done by summing. When you export the peaks are only limited by the format. Regular (integer) WAV files are hard-limited to 0dB and you’ll get clipping if you try to go over.
MP3 can go over 0dB, but I’m not sure what the limit is. It may depend on the frequency content or “complexity” of the sound. But your “final production” shouldn’t go over 0dB because it will clip the listener’s DAC if they play it at “full digital volume”.
You may not need to go through all that. Mix and render to a separate track and then do your volume adjusting on that track. Export Selected that track.
I red this article with interest as I have the same problem described by trompethans. And my solution always was that way which trompethans described in the last sentence. Now I have an advice from DVDdoug and kozikowski. Thanks for that.
But in my opinion, there is always an additional step to do. So my preference would be a possibility to grab all sliders of the mixer window with one click and change the volume of all track in one step. Indeed I tested (of course without success) the combination Shift+Click or Strg+Click or Alt+Click. This combinations every user knows i.e. from the filehandling within the Explorer.