Hello:
I’d like to set my self-recorded songs to ‘normalization’ before making a CD.
Is there a particular Audacity version that I need for this? ( Free Version, Pro, etc)
Any help will be appreciated
Thanks,
Mike
The latest version of Audacity has “loudness normalization” which is better for volume consistency from track to track if you select LUFS …
Note that Loudness Normalization does not check for clipping.
So make sure View → Show Clipping in Waveform is enabled.
If you get clipping run the Amplify effect on the clipped track(s) and accept the default to bring the peaks down. Then, if you want to maintain Loudness Normalization, run Amplify on the other tracks to bring them all down by the same amount. That’s the Amplification, not the New Peak. We don’t expect the peaks (which don’t correlate well with loudness) to be the same.
Or, you can use WaveGain to loudness-match your WAV files before burning the CD. By default, it checks for clipping so if it can’t hit the target loudness without clipping it will only adjust-up for 0dB peaks.
Or, with a limited number of files (like for a CD) there is a manual procedure -
1- Run regular (peak) Normalize or the Amplify effect on all tracks so they all have “maximized” 0dB peaks.
2 - Listen (1) and if they are all equally loud, you’re done.
3- If not, choose the quietest one as your reference and adjust the louder ones down to match that reference.
(1) Alternatively, you can check the LUFS loudness with Youlean online loudness meter..
Commercial CDs are done by-ear and sometimes there are intentionally-louder and intentionally-quieter tracks.
Although Audacity can set the LUFS level with Loudness Normalization it doesn’t have a built-in way to simply check and report the the current LUFS loudness.
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Audacity was and is free and open source.