Hello. I have a number of CDs that I’ve “burned” to a USB drive as FLAC files to listen to in my car. The volume levels are all over the place, so I want to normalize them (to -1 dB?)
(1) The songs are organized as: artist\album\song.flac. Is there any way to normalize the drive’s contents as a batch or do I have to work within each artist\album folder ?
(2) Audacity wants me to save work as a project file. Can’t I just save the changes to the independent .flac files ?
Thank you.
“Normalization” and “Loudness Normalization” are two different things
Project files are optional. In Audacity File ->Export makes a regular audio file (WAV , MP3, FLAC, etc.). File->Save makes /saves an Audacity project.
Regular normalization sets the peak level which doesn’t correlate well with perceived loudness. (It’s a mathematical or statistical term.) Most CD tracks are already 0dB peak normalized, including many quiet-sounding ones.
The Loudness Normalization effect can set the LUFS level which is made for loudness matching.
But it’s tricky… Loudness Normalization doesn’t check for clipping (distortion) clipping so it’s hard to know what LUFS level to choose.
Unfortunately, Audacity can’t just measure the current LUFS level but the Youlean Online Loudness Meter is free. (There is also a Youlean plug-in but I don’t know if it works with the current Audacity.)
If you just want to loudness match an album or a few tracks, there is a “procedure” you can use:
1- Normalize (maximize) all of the tracks for 0dB peaks.
2 - Measure the LUFS level (or listen) and choose the quietest track as your reference.
3 - Adjust the other tracks down to match with Loudness Normalization (or by-ear).
Or, if you want to loudness match your whole music library you can use WaveGain. WaveGain is based on ReplayGain and is similar to MP3Gain. It can batch process. It uses a loudness target that works with most songs but, by default, it won’t push the volume up into clipping. So, you can end-up with a few songs that are still quieter than the others, but overall it works very well. There is no FLAC version so you’ll have to process WAV files before converting to FLAC.
Or you can choose an LUFS level which rarely pushes the peaks over 0dB into potential (1) clipping , and then run the Amplify or Normalize to bring the level back down. Or run the Limiter to push-down the peaks, but that’s a non-linear effect that can affect the sound.
(1) Audacity uses floating point internally so it can go over 0dB without clipping (it will show red for potential clipping). But regular WAV and FLAC files can’t go over 0dB and you’ll get clipping when you export.
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