I am using Audacity 3.7.5 on a Windows 11 64-bit system.
I have an album with 10 tracks. I want to combine all the tracks into a single track. Normalize this new track and export it as an MP3 file. I have spent several hours over the past 4 days trying to find the information that I need without success. Any help will be appreciated, thanks.
I would use loudness normalisation on each track individually, (-14LUFS), then align end to end, then export as extreme quality mp3. You should have 1 or 2dB headroom before exporting to mp3, you may need to use a soft limiter, (without make-up gain), to ensure that is the case.
With Loudness Normalization you have to watch out for clipping.
The limiter is one way to handle it. Audacity itself won’t clip but an alternative to limiting, you can run regular (peak) Normalization before exporting (after Loudness Normalization) to set the overall peak level without messing-up the relative loudness between tracks.
Just FYI - Usually an album has a separate file for each track. Your software player can play the tracks in order from the metadata (“tags”) and it can show the song title.
But if you want gapless playback you might need to use a different format.
MP3 adds a bit of silence to the beginning and end and some players can’t skip over the added silence.