Hi, i just started making some basic youtube videos, and im using audacity to make my voice louder because my voice isn’t loud enough. So i select my video, its about 14 minutes long. Then i try to normalize it to make my voice louder, but nothing happends. But if i record a shost audio file about 6 sec long, then it works just fine.
I don’t know if it is meant to do that or it’s just me it’s happening for.
Btw. I dont have the newest version atm, im using 2.3.
Thanks for any help.
It’s probably working fine, but it may not do what you think it does…
Normalize scans the file to find the loudest peak(s). Then it adjusts the volume of the whole file so the new peak is 0dB.
Also, “loudness” is moore-related to the average level than the peaks… You can have a file with hundreds or thousands of 0dB peaks that doesn’t sound loud.
If your file has 0dB peak somewhere it won’t do anything. If you have a peak very-near 0dB, it will only make a small change. If you’ve done some processing to push the peak over 0db, it will bring the peak down to 0dB.
Normalize is probably misnamed. People want it to make everything “normal” and that’s not what it does.
Normalize and its cousin Amplify are arithmetic tools. They have no idea what music or voices are. All they do is pick the one highest peak of sound in the show you selected and changes the overall volume so that one peak lands at 0. Normalize does it to left and right independently, Amplify does it to the show as a whole.
Each of these tools has options, but that’s the short version.
So if you have one place in the video where you dropped a bowling ball or sneezed or the dog barked, that one sound is going to take over the whole show. The tools aren’t as valuable as you thought.
You can probably make good use of the compressor tools. Those are the tools that can change the soft sounds and loud sounds independently
http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/compressor.html
You can also mess with a combination of Hard Limiter and Amplify. Hard Limiter can cut off that one loud sound that’s taking over the show and allow Amplify or Normalize to do their job.
All these tools create distortion. That’s how they work. The result show is not an exact louder copy of the one at the beginning.
This is where good speakers or headphones are handy. Are you OK with the show in the way you changed it? You must be able to hear what you’re doing.
Koz
Thanks for the help and the wuick reply, I can see I misunderstood what the normalize tool do. 
If you’re not up to learning what the tools do, you can try the one-size-fitz-all processor. Chris’s Compressor works like a broadcast radio station. It levels out the sound, makes it louder and helps soften peaks and other sound oddities.
http://theaudacitytopodcast.com/chriss-dynamic-compressor-plugin-for-audacity/
Koz